Preface

About this draft:

• The language is rough.  I won’t be editing for readability for a while.
• It is the third of three major drafts.  The first was just to get the ideas on paper.  The second was to make them accessible to people who work with change. This third draft is a first attempt to make the ideas accessible to anyone interested in understanding and working with the disruptions in their lives and systems.

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Engaging Emergence:

Turning Upheaval into Opportunity

Preface

This book is about finding the gifts and potential inherent in today’s unprecedented turmoil.

Chris, a client of mine who has taken on a complex and ambitious task–transforming 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 risky.  With a board asking legitimate and traditional questions, like “What are you doing?” and  “What do you expect to achieve?” Chris is providing 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 a diverse group working with him walk it.

We live in unprecedented times.  With financial systems in turmoil, 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.  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. Leaders and change agents are struggling for 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.

This is no easy path.  Conflict and dissonance are squarely in the mix of change today. We’ve maintained an illusion of stability in our social systems for many years by suppressing a myriad of energies such as conflict, despair, fear, and rage, to say nothing of deep aspirations and individual and collective passions and dreams.  These feelings simmer just below the surface for many in our systems.  What will it take to address them and their material fallout as whole industries and social service systems stumble?

Success at such times draws from a different place within us, suggests different choices about who we engage with and how we interact, and even what we value as outcomes.  Choosing to work with upheaval is to seek possibility in the midst of uncertainty, to follow life’s energy, providing the means for working well – compassionately, creatively, and wisely — with whatever comes our way.

Is this book for you?

Are you facing upheaval, disturbance, dissonance in some aspect of your work or life?  If so, you’re in good company with journalists, automakers, school teachers, bankers, etc. who have lost jobs or experienced their industry faltering.  Can you see the rich diversity of capabilities, cultures, and aspirations among us?  Have you ever wondered how we can become more capable together than we are alone?  If you are looking for a source of courage, hope, and faith despite the dire warnings of collapse and struggling systems, this book offers a path to a livable future.

It brings both ideas and actions for those who wish to increase their capacity for working with uncertainty, upheaval, dissonance, and change.  It is for leaders – both formal and informal, change practitioners, activists and change agents of all sorts who face complex, important issues, and seek new alternatives for addressing them in these unprecedented times.  It provides insight into the intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual landscape that upheaval evokes in most of us, fostering compassion with ourselves and others.  It offers a framework for understanding the larger forces at play that create the sense of disruption most of us are experiencing and highlights individual and collective practices for working with those disruptions creatively.  And it focuses on what it takes to renew ourselves and our systems wisely, conserving what endures as we embrace what wasn’t possible before.

Whether you thrive on theory and having a map of the territory, prefer to focus on specifics you can practice, or favor the combination, this book seeks to equip you for working well with disruption by providing a practical perspective of the dynamics of emergent complexity through which order arises out of chaos. It gives this abstract but useful idea legs, grounding it in stories of how it shows up in our lives and offers guidance any of us can take when faced with the unknown.

Why does it matter?

Emergence, short-hand for emergent complexity, is novel and increasingly complex order arising from disorder.  It  isn’t just a metaphor for what we are experiencing.  The disruptive shifts occurring in our systems are signs of the natural phenomenon of evolutionary emergence in process. While it is possible that today’s unprecedented conditions will lead to chaos and collapse, they also contain the seeds of emergent renewal, coalescing into a vibrant, inclusive society arising from creative interactions among diverse people facing intractable challenges.  In many ways, the path is counterintuitive, breaking with traditional thinking about change: that it occurs top-down; that it follows an orderly plan, a step at a time.

There are no guarantees with emergence but it is possible to engage with it with some confidence that wholly unexpected breakthroughs occur.  That said, it isn’t for the faint of heart.  Working with emergence involves some unfamiliar 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.  Albert Einstein observed that enduring problems “cannot be solved at the level they were created”.  Einstein is pointing to emergence.  It is our best hope for meeting the complex challenges of our times.

As more of us work well with dissonance, we improve our collective capacity to meet the needs of individuals, our social systems, and our world.  In other words, our survival in an increasingly unpredictable world is at stake and engaging emergence is a promising pathway to do something about it.

What’s in the book?

The introduction speaks to the pain of disruption and the potential for breakthrough by embracing upheaval.  It tells some of my story of learning to engage emergence.

Part I, A Theory of Engaging Emergence, offers theory to make sense upheaval as a promising source for change.

Chapter one, What is Emergence? defines emergence and elaborates its nature.  It offers some design principles implied by the characteristics of emergent complexity.  The chapter ends with some history of how our understanding of emergence has evolved.

Chapter two, What’s the Catch? names some of the idiosyncrasies that make working with emergence so challenging.

Chapter three, Emergence as a Lived Experience, speaks to the underlying dynamics of change that shape our experience.  It puts emergent dynamics in context, describing the evolutionary dance between coherence and differentiation.

Part II, Practices for Engaging Emergence, provides some guidance for facing disturbances.

Chapter four, Preparing to Engage, offers three personal practices for working well with emergence:

• Embracing mystery
• Seeking life-energy
• Choosing possibility

Chapter five, Hosting: Creating Well-Intentioned Containers, focuses on cultivating conditions for working with upheaval and disturbance:

• Tuning in
• Focusing intentions
• Tending to context

Chapters six through eight explore three questions, diving into practices gleaned from working with change in organizations, communities, and other social systems:

Chapter 6:  How Do We Disrupt Coherence Compassionately?

• Inquiring appreciatively
• Welcoming who and what arrives
• Inviting diversity

Chapter 7:  How Do We Engage Disruption Creatively?

• Opening to possibility
• Initiating by taking responsibility for what you love

Chapter 8:  How Do we Renew Coherence Wisely?

• Reflecting, seeking patterns
• Naming what is emerging
• Harvesting, sharing stories

Chapter 9:  Iterating: Do It Again…And again, speaks to working with what is set in motion by engaging emergence.

Chapter 10, What’s Next?  The Promise of the Macroscope, reflects on the implications of increasing our capacity to see ourselves as part of a complex system.  It offers some hope for our ability to respond to upheaval and today’s challenges.

One Last Item

Here’s the marketing pitch: working with 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.Pre

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.

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.

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[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

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

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?

3. Emergence as a Lived Experience

Disturbance, dissonance, conflict, and upheaval are signs that something or someone in a system is seeking change.  It may not be a conscious seeking.  In natural systems, it could be winds, storms, and earthquakes destroying habitat and homes. In social systems, it might be an individual or group surfacing feelings of exclusion, finding no place or a lesser place for themselves in the current state of things.  Disturbance heralds change, whether for an individual challenged by an oppressive manager, the civil rights movement in full swing, or an Iranian demonstration protesting a rigged election.

The Forces of Change: Disturbance in Context

Change occurs where there is life energy to call forth something new.  Such aliveness exists where there is dynamic tension.  In the old story of change, tensions and disturbances are to be avoided.  They are disruptive and unwelcome.  By suppressing them, they often become fixed, stuck.  Something goes dead.  We learn how to walk around these dead zones, sometimes forgetting they are even there.  Such deadening leads to alienation, greed, intolerance, and inaction or violence, characteristics present in many of our current crises.

What if tensions became a source of curiosity, something to be embraced?  Where there is tension, there is inevitably a competing energy – male/female, mainstream/alternative, progressive/conservative.  What if rather than treating these tensions as win-lose conflicts, we treat them as partnerships, each with something to offer?   Framed in this way, such dynamic dances lend themselves to stability, but one that is always in motion – alive.  Biology teaches us that when a system reaches equilibrium — stability, it is dead.  Chaos and complexity theories suggest that life and learning exist at the boundary between order and chaos.  Needless to say, following the life energy in upheaval requires a different quality of attention.  It develops an understanding that we can disagree AND be connected. In the new story of change upheaval plays a central role.

No matter the size or scope of the disturbance, there is a fundamental dynamic of change that influences everything about it.  It is an eternal dance — chaos/order, convergence/divergence, coherence/differentiation — an ever-present, often dissonant tension, between two natural forces as old as the universe itself.

In every system, there is

• a drive for coherence — for relationship, harmony, unity, community, wholeness – a coming together – convergence. Think of atoms forming molecules, people joining into communities, or our longing to contribute to something larger than ourselves.

• a drive for differentiation — individuality, distinction, uniqueness – a breaking apart – divergence.  Think of teenagers separating from parents to find their identity, a co-worker striking off to freelance, or our longing to be accepted just as we are.

The next time you interact with someone, notice the dance.  What you say, what you do is, in some way, bringing you closer together or sending you further apart.  The metaphor of the pendulum swing is often how we think of this dynamic: sometimes favoring coherence, for example, cultivating a spirit of community.  As pressure to conform in order to hold together the community becomes too intense, the pendulum swings towards favoring individuality.

What would it mean to experience both a spirit of community and a feeling that individuality mattered?  To hold such tensions, allowing opposites to co-exist, is a breakthrough that re-defines who we are as a social system.  It indicates a higher-order of complexity has emerged.

Emergent change practices support discovery of this third way.  The dynamic dance shifts from the back and forth of a two-step to a jazzy spiral that serves a similar intention in a novel way.  Understand these rhythms and you understand something essential about change.

Every social system involves give and take between individuals and the systems they’re in.  The system influences them and they influence the system and both change gradually.  The community celebrates members leaving to pursue their dreams, carrying with them the cultural narrative that orders their lives.  The prodigal child returns to be embraced by the community, bringing home new ideas that find their way into the community’s fabric.

Much of the angst we face today is because, rather than a gradual evolution as forces interact, the interplay of coherence and differentiation seem to be moving towards their extremes.  We maintain our sense of coherence by drawing boundaries – physical or psychological – to protect those inside our neighborhoods or organizations and to keep the “other” out.  This desire to hold on to how things are, to shelter what we hold dear, is a natural response when our way of life seems threatened.  Ironically, an unintended consequence is a growing feeling of isolation that separates us from others.  This tension between coming together and moving apart shows up in the constant squabbling between “silos” in organizations or conflicts between neighbors over seemingly trivial differences because we don’t really know who lives next door.  These interactions, when laden with fear, anger and despair, simultaneously divide us and influence us to stay silent in order to belong.

The net result is that our assumptions of how things work – our coherent cultural narrative – is no longer playing out as expected.  This narrative — the cultural myth, the larger than life story we tell ourselves about who we are – is in transition.  An increasing number of people no longer feel well served by it.  For example, in the U.S., a growing number of people no longer believe the American Dream is possible for their children or themselves.[source?]  When the story of who we are is no longer working, it is no wonder people engage in strategies to disrupt the existing order.

When stable systems that contain something we cherish break apart, it naturally brings grief, fear, and anger.  We feel it because we care.   Those who see potential in the breakdown, find excitement and hope.  This rich stew holds tremendous opportunity for a renaissance – literally a re-birth – of creative endeavor.  Particularly for those in mourning or denial, believing this is an act of faith.  This dynamic is at play all around us.  I see it within journalism. Many in mainstream media — where assumptions about how news is gathered and shared, not to mention what constitutes news, are failing — are filled with fear, grief, and anger.  Those in new media, who are experimenting with novel forms of journalism, are excited and filled with possibility.  Whether facing loss or devising something new, caring people bring their life-energy to creating something that matters.  In the rare meetings between these groups, generally stereotypes play out:  traditional journalists criticize the shallow fact checking and lack of quality standards of non-traditional sources.  New media people have little patience with the arrogant gate-keeping attitude of their legacy counterparts.  In contrast, when they meet using emergent change processes, these unlikely bedfellows are creating journalism anew.  From the inside out, a revitalization of time-honored journalistic values within a newly thriving participatory culture is in motion.  When given nutrient working conditions, legacy and new media people collaborate and create.  They dance a jazzy spiral rather than a combative two-step.  On its own, emergent change can go either way.  By understanding the forces at play, we can engage emergence and create conditions for breakthrough rather than breakdown.

The Feel of Emergence: Working from the Inside Out

I was invited to spend some time with a group of journalists who had just “had the year from hell”.  One third of them were in different jobs.  Some had taken buyouts, others were laying off staff.  They were almost all numb from the upheaval in their world.  I was asked to tell them something about emergence, about change that would help them make sense of their experience so that they could return to work more resilient, with more capacity to face the maelstrom they were in.  We called the session “Good Grief: The Pain and Possibility of Change”.

As systems fall apart – either figuratively, as we examine the elements in them, or literally, as the newspaper industry is doing – we can visit the pieces, noticing what still has meaning and what no longer serves.  Is journalism still about the public good?  Is speaking truth to power still part of its ethos?  What about giving voice to the voiceless?  What wasn’t present before that may have a place now?  How does the ability for online conversation or for anyone to publish change the equation?  Social networking supports communities of interest to form around subjects, like photography, or around geographies — local towns or neighborhoods — so that stories are not just reported but engage neighbors in conversation.  As these elements from the past and present coalesce, through some unexpected leap, they will likely form a new journalism with properties none of us can predict.  For example, there is an emerging role of “community weaver” or host who cultivates a space for people to interact.  These many-to-many interactions are reshaping the nature of news.  Journalists get tips and information, discover subjects to investigate, and have access to local knowledge and expertise.  Neighbors converse, share opinions, doubts, expectations, ideas, and more.  The journalists are not outside as gatekeepers, but inside, a contributing part of the system.  This new journalism is still for the public good and because technology enables a dimension never before possible, it has taken a leap towards its own unique form.

Of course writing about systems falling apart is much easier than living through the experience!  Much of the challenge with emergence is the emotional roller coaster ride that often accompanies it.  If something we love shows signs of collapse, most of us try to hold on.  It is no wonder that embracing emergence is a challenge.  Yet, there are good reasons to do so. Three useful questions for riding the waves when engaging  emergence are:

• How do we disrupt coherence compassionately?
• How do we engage disruption creatively?
• How do we renew coherence 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 harmony arises anew that serves us well?

These questions provide entry points into the dynamic dance between coherence and difference, helping to make visible and work with the forces of change underway.

How do we disrupt coherence compassionately?

When images of disrupting stable systems come to mind, many of us picture protests against governments and their policies.  Yet systems are disrupted in a myriad of ways, some caused by us, some caused by conditions beyond our control.  We leave a marriage, the auto industry collapses, a hurricane comes through our town.  Even loving acts – asking a partner to stop smoking, getting a promotion — disturb the current state.

The current state of journalism is on an emotional roller coaster ride as seen through the eyes of different people in the system:

• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has closed its doors, part of the wave of newspapers folding.  Who’s next?
• I’ve taken a buyout and have done public relations work for a year.  How can I find my way back into the journalistic work I find meaningful?
• With journalism in such upheaval, what do I tell my students?
• If not gatekeepers, what is our role?
• As a reporter, how do I interact with audience?
• With ad revenues falling, what is the business model that can sustain journalism?
• The Huffington Post just established an investigative unit.  What’s next?
• How do I connect my community in civil conversation so that news engages more than just professionals?

Whatever your opinion of journalism as we’ve known it, there is little debate that good information – and conversation — is essential to democracy.  The current model has been stable since the 19^th century.  No wonder those who grew up inside it are disoriented, angry, fearful or grieving as it falters. To borrow a phrase from Margaret Wheatley, we are hospicing the old and midwiving the new.   The good news is that no matter the source or intent of the disruption, we have a choice in what we do with it.

One promising approach is asking ambitious, possibility-oriented questions.  They are attractors, bringing together diverse people who care.  Great questions disrupt, but with intention.  Coupled with a welcoming environment, they open the way to discover what wants to emerge.  A useful general question is Given all that has happened, what is possible now?

You might ask, “With so many disruptions coming at us, why disrupt anything?  Why don’t we just figure out how to respond?”  We are not independent of our environment.  Consider the newspaper editor who, because his paper is dying, is laying off forty people and wonders how to do that well.  Or what about the situation a friend described:

One faculty member is so overwhelmed that he is calling meetings at the same time as a regularly scheduled all-faculty meeting.  The temptation to disrupt back is high.  So how do you avoid escalating into mutually shared disruption?

Enter the idea of disrupting compassionately.  Whether we are outside a system wanting in or inside the system wanting to change it, or even faced with an unexpected event, like a hurricane or an accident, bringing compassion into the equation shifts our focus and our options.  What if compassion were a guiding ideal for those plotting revolution?  Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this principle.  While the systems they faced were hostile, their strategies for engagement were compassionate, applied with clear intention and commitment.  And they changed their worlds.  Such can be the power of compassion for disrupting rigid systems.

From the other side, what is it like when our world is disrupted?  How are auto workers feeling, not just about losing their jobs, but losing a way of life that has shaped their lives, their children’s lives, their community’s lives?  It is easy to say, “serves them right for making an inferior product” in the abstract.  I dare any of us to say it face to face to a grieving member of the industry, someone who sees their work as an important contribution that helps our society run well.

Compassion, at root, means to suffer together.  So whether we are the cause or simply caught in the disruption, bringing compassion into the equation means we face the situation together.  There is comfort, strength, and courage available by choosing compassion, even if we are in conflict. Compassion helps us speak our truth, connecting us even as it differentiates what matters to each of us.  With practice, such expressions become gifts.  Our individual voices matter, helping discern meaningful aspects of the emerging system.  When dissonance becomes an indicator of new and better possibility, it is easier to get curious rather than resist or defend.  Whether we let go by choice or from overwhelmed, it raises another useful question for working with emergence.

How do we engage disruptions creatively?

Picture a room aswirl with activity.  A question has been posed:

What is our work in the new news ecology?

A diverse mix of mainstream journalists, technologists, new media people, educators, reformers and others are setting their agenda:

• Who funds investigative reporting?
• What do we teach our journalism students?
• How does social media affect journalism?
• What’s the role of humor in journalism?
• Are we having fun yet?

People self-organize around the topics they have chosen, pursing the conversations that matter to them.  An activist expresses her frustration with finding investigative reporters willing to listen.  The reporters coach her on how to get their attention.  By the end of the conversation, they each see the other differently, appreciating the challenges and constraints of each other’s world.

Angst and fear of what will happen as newspapers die begins to give way to an undercurrent of excitement and possibility.  Opportunities are showing up everywhere.  Stories surface of community-hosted sites where audience is part of the investigative process and journalists are “writing in public”.  Journalism curriculum is re-imagined to include media literacy for everyone, traditional values and craft, and the emerging art of engagement – how to cultivate civil conversation online and face to face in a geographic or subject-oriented community. A myriad of possibilities are explored, ideas surfaced.  A sorting takes place, as aspects of the past, present, and future are tasted and embraced or discarded.  Through random engagement, following the energy and passion of the people present, the system is examined in depth.  Questions are asked, debated, mourned and celebrated: What still has meaning that we wish to conserve?  What is possible now because of changes in technology or attitudes that we wish to embrace?

As the old stories die and new stories are born, the renaissance becomes visible through conversation and experimentation.  It seems more resilient, with room for more voices.  Its shape isn’t clear and probably won’t be for a while. We are between stories, transitioning from old forms to new, more adaptive forms.

Still, when disturbed, most of us would rather hunker down someplace safe bringing what we wish to protect with us.  Rather than creating a space to keep us safe and keep the “other” out, creative dissonance calls for just the opposite.  Deep and essential truths often hide in dissonant behaviors like shouting or silence, bullying or invisibility.  It is our challenge to create conditions welcoming enough to surface these gifts.

With practice, our capacity to embrace chaos expands. Think about driving in an unfamiliar part of the world, say India.  The assumptions about how traffic works are different from the US.  It takes 360º vision to navigate among the chaotic flow of cars, bicycles, mule-drawn carts and other vehicles. Horn honks become friendly signals meaning  someone is behind you, rather than the angry sound of “get out of my way”.  Driving in another culture requires letting go of familiar rules of traffic flow and opening to discover driving anew.  I loved discovering new meaning in old aspects, like horns and unfamiliar aspects, like mule carts backing up on a main street.

If differences are overwhelming, step back and breathe.  If you can’t see the guiding patterns, listen, observe, be receptive to what surrounds you.  Notice what is meaningful; make an intuitive inventory of what is happening.  Look at the familiar with new eyes.  Is it still meaningful?.  Is it something to conserve?  What is new and unexpected?  Look through the eyes of someone who finds excitement in it.  Is it something to be embraced?

As different perspectives rub against each other, a burnishing occurs.  Together, we make meaning, surfacing patterns that draw from all aspects of what is present. Expressing differences is critical because it carries the seeds of what might be.  Our unique perspectives matter.  Where there is space for each of us to show up and engage fully, warts and all, what is most meaningful shines through over and over.  It creates a “differentiated wholeness” in which people discover what matters most to them is universal.  They discover they are not alone but part of some larger whole.  Hearts open and we know we are connected.  In truth, even when we can’t feel it and our hearts are closed, we are still connected.  Just as head, heart, and hands are essential parts of one body, so our unique gifts connect us as parts of a larger social system.

During a Journalism that Matters gathering, I understood that an important aspect of the fear and grief from mainstream journalists was that enduring values of journalism, such as accuracy and transparency would be swept away.  What, in fact, became clear during the session, is that such values are something to be conserved as so much else changes.  Ironically, when seen through the lens of traditional values, new technologies provide tools for even greater accuracy and transparency.  What matters endures.  New forms can amplify deeper intentions.  As people discover their place in mix, excitement builds, possibilities abound.

As one journalist put it, When systems break down, you gather up the pieces and make something new.  Simple, though not easy.  It raises another question.

How do we renew coherence wisely?

Remember Humpty Dumpty’s fall?  The pieces didn’t fit together again.  Emergence is like that.  What arises from the interactions is not a return to former times. It is more like a spiral.  No system exists in a vacuum.  Elements from the past endure, even as something completely original and of a higher-order complexity arises.

It is the last day of a gathering with 80 people sitting together.  They arrived as strangers – mainstream media and new media journalists, activists, educators, students.  Now they sit comfortably with each other, joking over the angst that surfaced more than once during their two days together.  They glimpsed the future and find it promising.  Most feel full, inspired by ideas they are taking home.  They know they are in good company with kindred spirits, others who care about the future of journalism.  They have partners in shaping that future.  They are part of something larger – the rebirth of an industry, a calling, that serves the public good.  They begin telling a new story of journalism, more conversation than lecture, more entrepreneurial and nimble.  There is increased cooperation, knowing they are connected, part of the same system, each pursuing what matters to them, sharing what they learn, figuring it out together.

In some ways, nothing has changed.  The economics of journalism are as murky as when they arrived.  They may be going home to lay off people or to take a buyout.  In other ways, everything has changed.  Most are feeling more at peace with not knowing the answers.  Joan Baez is quoted frequently:  “action is the antidote to despair.”  No longer victims of the unknown, they see their own first next step.  And they know others traveling a similar path, partners in exploration and learning.  A network of pioneers is forming.  At root, journalism’s fundamental purpose – to inform and engage for the public good endures.  New technology makes new forms possible increasing their ability to involve more people in serving this mission.  So something novel and of a higher-order form is emerging.  It is clear journalism is no longer in the hands of a few people.  Complex networks of professionals and engaged citizens are part of the budding scene.  The holy grail of a sustainable business model may not yet be known, but they are now pioneers on the trail, inventing the future.

My hunch is that our deepest needs, intentions, and values endure.  What changes are the forms.  Innovations – social networks, Twitter — are slowly integrated with existing forms of journalism.  Every once in a while something flips, becomes a new organizing principle: Journalism is entrepreneurial.  Just as the printing press opened the way to increased literacy, today, media literacy follows the need to discern quality from the multiplicity of sources that come from entrepreneurship.  It is one example of the re-ordering of the system.

There is a turn on a spiral of change happening as something thoroughly original and elegantly complex returns to enduring needs and values.  It defies tidy descriptions as new and old aspects intertwine in the dance of differentiating and cohering.  It is evolution itself unfolding, sometimes incrementally, sometimes making unexpected leaps.

Emerging Networks

We are in the midst of a great renewal of how we organize ourselves for just about everything we do.  Technology and changing perspectives make hierarchies and rigid structures less critical.  The leader as heroic individual is losing its shine.  Networks, more adaptive and resilient, are slowly taking their place, along with the understanding that leaders are everywhere, in each of us.

The Wikipedia is a terrific place to follow breaking news.  As a story unfolds, those closest to it add or correct information, link to photos or sites for people to locate loved ones or relevant details.  Filtering facts happens through self-correcting crowd-sourcing.  We are no longer dependent on a few professionals or leaders for all aspects of the story.  Leadership arises from within the situation as individuals answer some internal call to serve.

The old forms – ink on paper, gatekeepers telling us what we need to know – are replaced by networks of conversations, emergent leadership, and content delivered to a variety of devices – computers, televisions, ipods, and perhaps a bit of ink and paper.  As hierarchies give way to networks, single points of control for story ideas, follow-up information, accuracy, and other aspects yield to networks that can handle complexity that is simply impossible to address any other way.  Habits from one form are revisited both practically and emotionally.  Technology helps us operate more fluidly.  Yet for those who didn’t grow up as digital natives, it can be daunting!

What does it take to function well in a network?  We are novices at this.  Increasing numbers of people are experimenting, most without consciously knowing they are part of a great re-ordering.  Some disrupt more compassionately, use their differences creatively, and renew wisely.  They are sharing the results in creative ways – through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other forms that make visible our interconnectedness.  A virtuous cycle is forming in which more and more of us can see our place in a multi-storied world that has room for us all.

We know networks are more collaborative, with leadership shifting fluidly as work groups form and disperse as needed.  They also provide a different relationship with context  — knowing how we fit with others and our environment. When people experience themselves as part of a larger system, their behavior changes.  To ignore or harm another part of their “social body” would be like cutting off their own arm.

They begin to see disruption as an indicator that something they thought was outside the system wants in.  They may event meet the situation with curiosity.

The U.S. constitution provides an ideal example as the definition of “we the people” has evolved over two hundred years.  Sometimes through violent disruption, sometimes through changing social attitudes and legal action, women got the vote, African-Americans became whole people in the eyes of the law.  More recently, Ecuador has led the way to including nature’s rights in its constitution.

Because of today’s technologies, we are at an exciting moment.  We have the means to bring what we are learning about working well with disruption and difference into broad awareness.  Using new tools, people are creating a myriad of approaches that enable us to see how our diverse stories fit together into a “macroscopic view”.  Just as microscopes opened our world to see the infinitely small, and telescopes to see the infinitely large, macroscopes – experiences, maps, stories, and media that help us see ourselves in context – will be instrumental in helping us see the infinitely complex, making sense of differences, changing our understanding of what is outside and inside a system.

DeRosnay's Macroscope

Figure 1.  From Joël de Rosnay’s The Macroscope

Naming Emerging Coherence

When we’re in the midst of exploring possibilities, what helps it land, what enables a higher-order understanding to surface?  It is a good time to reflect, to invite people to share their stories of what has heart and meaning.  Beginning with individual energy, the path towards coherence grows from the inside out.  Coherence emerges through noticing differences.  As people share what matters, a handful of themes invariably surface.  Something is named that lands deeply and broadly.  It has legs as people carry it with them to others struggling to find their way.  While it may be days, months, or years before it is widely embraced, something is different, something new has been born into the world.  Perhaps it is entrepreneurial journalism.  Or a U.S. prison population reduced by half while maintaining public safety.

Does it mean that something wise been realized?  Chances are we won’t know for a while.  At root, wisdom means “to see, to know the way”.  It taps knowledge deeper than the rational mind and engages intuitions forged through experience.  While it may be voiced through an individual, it is a capacity that lives in the collective.  In a wise society people continually grow their capacity to care for themselves, each other, and the whole.  Its institutions are designed to support this growth.

Wisdom has an innate congruence with the direction of evolution, towards increasing complexity, diversity, and awareness at an increasing pace of change.  The need to engage diverse perspectives creatively may be the evolutionary leap our current social and environmental crises are forcing.  Handling so much complexity wisely means we can’t do it alone.  Increased awareness of how to bring together difference and stay connected is one vital aspect of this current time.  Hosting productive conversations among increasingly diverse people is part of a new story of who we are as a society.  The Internet gives us an unprecedented lens into other cultures.  Social networking capabilities are rapidly increasing our ability to interact.  How we use these opportunities is up to us.  It makes it a good time to learn more about wisdom.

Wisdom knows to sense in many directions – inside and outside the boundaries of a system, from the tangible and intangible, from the individual and collective.  It uses many ways of knowing – listening to the mind, the heart, the body – including the social body, and the spirit.  What seems wise in one age or circumstance may seem foolish in another. There is a Taoist story: One day, a farmer’s horse ran away, and all the neighbors gathered in the evening and said ‘that’s too bad.’ He said ‘maybe.’ Next day, the horse came back and brought with it seven wild horses. ‘Wow!’ they said, ‘Aren’t you lucky!’ He said ‘maybe.’ The next day, his son grappled with one of these wild horses and tried to break it in.  He got thrown and broke his leg. And all the neighbors said ‘oh, that’s too bad that your son broke his leg.’ He said, ‘maybe.’ The next day, the conscription officers came around, gathering young men for the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And the visitors all came around and said ‘Isn’t that great! Your son got out.’ He said, ‘maybe.’  And the story continues.

So wisdom knows patience, staying open as others rush to judgment.  That said, since humans are involved, we’ll undoubtedly try a wealth of experiments, some wise, some not so wise.  If an innovation creates disruption, then we have indications that something is evocative enough that it attracts interest and that someone or something excluded cares enough to make it known.  And so we circle back to disrupting compassionately, knowing now that welcoming in outside voices brings treasures.  And in this way, perhaps a bit more wisdom endures.

Part II Practices for Engaging Emergence

[Note:  Part II is just roughed in.  Revisions will be in place in about a month.]

The practices I offer come from what many of us have learned through working with emergent change processes, such as Open Space Technology, Future Search, Appreciative Inquiry, the World Café, Bohm Dialogue, Dynamic Facilitation, and others. Whether through conversations with the originators of these methodologies, my own practice, studying the work of friends and colleagues, analyzing the principles behind these practices, hosting workshops and conference sessions to seek the deeper patterns of change, these are the practices that are consistently named.

Together, they form a system for working with emergence.  Every designer works with them in different ways, creating the distinct character of their practice.  Where names have been widely adopted by change practitioners, I have drawn from them – hence inquiring appreciatively, opening, harvesting, hosting.  The map that follows organizes these practices around the questions for engaging emergence.

Here’s a summary:

When existing order is disrupted, bringing joy, fear, anger, grief, choose possibility. Enter into mystery and follow the life-energy in the situation.

Prepare yourself for

Hosting: Creating a well-intentioned container by tuning in, focusing intentions and tending to context.

Ask How do we disrupt coherence compassionately?

It is time for

Inquiring appreciatively: asking bold questions for possibility.

To increase the likelihood for breakthrough, go for breadth by

Inviting: attracting the diversity of the system

and go for depth by

Welcoming: cultivating hospitable space in which people bring their authentic presence.

As diverse people come together, jump in by

Opening: being receptive to the unknown, letting go to explore the many aspects of the system with fresh eyes.

Ask How do we engage disruption creatively?

Try

Engaging: taking responsibility for what you love as an act of service.

Do so by

Listening: sensing broadly and deeply, witnessing with self-discipline and

Connecting: being with difference while finding common bonds.

Ultimately, begin

Reflecting: sensing patterns.

And ask How do we renew coherence wisely?

Then something magic happens.  There is a

Naming: making meaning on behalf of the whole by calling forth what is ripening.

Made visible by

Harvesting: sharing the stories through multiple modes and channels – music, song, visual arts, dance, poetry and more.  Told on film, in books, in the news, in theatres, and elsewhere.

There is one last step, which in truth, never ends —

Iterating: doing it again and again, integrating what we know into what’s novel and what’s novel into what we know.

And so it goes…

**********

A brief summary of each practice follows.  You’ll note many places where patterns intertwine.  For example, inquiring appreciatively supports reflection and naming is an aspect of focusing intentions.  Each practice is a thread, part of a larger weave.  Highlighting it makes it a useful entry point.  Like a tapestry, none of the threads has much beauty or life without its mates.

4. Preparing to Engage Emergence

Your organization is in turmoil; customers leaving, revenues dropping, employees demoralized.  Or your community is in crisis; services disintegrating, demands increasing, and apathy rising.  Or you are grappling the really gnarly challenges we all face:  the climate is warming, education, health care systems are faltering, the economy is tanking.  On another scale, you’ve lost your job, your relationship with your partner is a mess and your children avoid you.  What to do?

The good news is that all these signs of angst indicate someone cares.  Still, it is easy to be swept up in the turmoil, the emotional roller coaster that generally accompanies disturbance and upheaval.  What does it take to successfully address it?  As important as what you do is how you show up. It takes clear intention, courage, and tenacity to stay with something as it ripens into its fullness.  Perhaps even more challenging, it takes humility, receptivity, and curiosity.  What enables these qualities to rise to the fore?  Here are three personal practices that are particularly useful.

Embracing Mystery

Turmoil is a gateway to creativity and innovation.  Just as seeds root in rich, dark soil, so does emergent change require the darkness of the unknown.  After all, if we knew how the outcome and how to create it, then by definition, nothing unexpected arrives.  Even knowing its value, embracing mystery, being receptive to not knowing takes courage.  Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön speaks eloquently of this:

By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what’s happening, we begin to access our inner strength.

My ability to embrace mystery was most severely tested when I opened the space for 2,100 people, including 1,800 street kids in Bogotá, Colombia.  The physical space for our gathering seemed far too small.  I asked the sponsor, who was showing us the facility, how many people it held.  With an innocent look, she said 1,500.  I wondered what miracle she thought I could work to fit an additional 600 people inside!  Then we walked into a beautiful courtyard, easily large enough to hold us all.  The only catch: it was the rainy season.  So we agreed to set up both spaces and let the weather determine where we would gather.  And I took a deep breath, figuring it was a religious organization, maybe they had some pull.

Just to be sure it wasn’t only practical stuff testing my faith, the theme of our gathering was intended to be finding jobs for the kids after they finished the 6-month work program.  Days before the two-day event, the priest received devastating news: the jobs they had from public and private sources were in jeopardy because kids were showing up stoned and were stealing.  The theme took on a new urgency and a decidedly fear-based twist: from the best possible job opportunities now and in the future, it became saving the jobs they had.  I did my best to open the theme to be more affirmative, future focused.  In the end, saving jobs won.

One last factor: I don’t speak Spanish.

The oddest part is that I never panicked.  Rain seemed inevitable and in no way could I picture 2,100 people fitting in the room.  The theme was the most fear-based I’d ever work with.  And I was calm. Some part of me knew it would work.  Perhaps it was because I was clearly working with people who had handled crowds before.  While they needed my expertise on the Open Space Technology logistics, it was clear the kids and I were all in good hands in every other way.

The first day dawned warm and bright and held throughout; a miracle, as far as I was concerned.  And the theme didn’t deter the kids and their teachers from having the serious conversations they needed to keep their current jobs and think into their future.  With remarkable support around me, having no Spanish made no difference.

While there are always milestones to celebrate along the way, change is a never-ending journey.  The more I am at peace with this, the more I enter the unknown with a spirit of adventure.  I won’t be the first nor the last in the territory.  At some future date – a day, a week, a year, a century from now, if something still matters, what I know about it now will seem quaint. It is a great reminder that while certainty has it’s merits, the more comfortable I am with uncertainty, the more I act with humility, taking myself – and others – with a compassionate grain of salt.

There is a fundamental truth that cannot be avoided: no matter how thorough we are, there are always holes in wholeness.  Some aspect or group is always outside our frame of reference, mostly unseen. Disrupting the current state is often a result of what is outside looking for a way in.  By recognizing disruption as an indicator that an aspect of the system wants to be integrated into the whole, it becomes easier to get curious about what we don’t know and seek to learn what gifts it brings to the system.

This perspective brings a discipline to strive for excellence rather than perfection.  There are always unknowns.  Accepting this and getting curious is a wonderful way to direct life-energy towards what else is possible.

Seeking life energy

Where is the energy for change in the system?  What has juice for those who have a stake in its future?  Energy lives in hopes, dreams, desires, and aspirations.  It lives in fear, anger, and grief struggling to be heard.  For many, it lies buried under cynicism and indifference that protects a broken heart.  Drawing forth life energy is a sacred trust: if you awaken longing, be prepared to follow through.

In 2003, a coalition led by the U.S. Forest Service convened 175 diverse participants from a cross section of the San Bernardino mountain communities. Trees were dying and they knew fires were coming.  Having prepared for the fires and while they had the public’s attention, they invited residents, community associations, environmentalists, off-road vehicle association members, businesses, ranchers, federal, state and local government.  They gathered to envision the future, asking “What do we want the forests to look like in fifty years?”

My favorite story involved a group of ranchers, who leased government lands for grazing.  The first day began with two-hour paired appreciative interviews exploring what people loved about the mountains.  Most came back inspired.  As one man said, “I am the president of an off-road vehicle association and I just spent the last two hours with an environmentalist.  We discovered that we come to the forest for the same reason.”  Our sense of accomplishment was almost immediately dampened when an older man in a cowboy hat – a rancher – stood up and essentially said that the answer to the forest’s future was obvious: clear the land, sell the lumber, and let cattle graze.  Even as we caught our breath from this callous declaration, no doubt intended to disrupt, we knew he was speaking for an important subset in the room that had little patience with our possibility-oriented approach.

We did a lot of soul-searching that evening, given our plans for day two.  We redesigned using an analytic, left-brained activity and called it a night.  At breakfast, I spoke my lingering doubts, that to back away from our original right-brained, creative activity was a mistake.  We needed to trust that the creative energies would be stirred by getting out of our heads.  My partners agreed.  With trepidation, we asked people to form groups to create models of the forests of their desired future using crayons, small plastic toys, such as trees, people, and assorted other items.  To our surprise and relief, the “men with hats” jumped in with both feet, joining with others to envision multi-use forests that had something for everyone.

In the end, we didn’t abandon our commitment to a possibility orientation. We trusted the flow of life-energy, even when it surfaced as derision.  By moving away from words, a playful activity brought together these diverse, usually conflicted parties.  The toys helped them explore what mattered most, surfacing their differences and in the process, creating a cohesive community that made room for their competing interests.  The three-day summit resulted in an agreed upon vision and principles to guide long-term decision making, a preliminary set of projects, and an ongoing committee co-chaired by a government official and a community member to keep the work alive.

Energy fuels us.  It is the breath of life, breathing out – aspiring to be or do something more and breathing in – inspiring action towards that possibility in a continuous cycle that keeps us going against all odds.  For many, tuning in to energy is a spiritual act, connecting us to the unseen world.  It is something deeper and mysterious, that we know when we feel it and can sense when it is absent.  Architect Christopher Alexander speaks of a “quality without a name”.  This term finesses the conundrum that the moment we name “it”, it ceases to be alive. And when life-energy is absent, there is little juice to carry the work forward.

Life energy exists at the intersection of what we know and don’t know.  It fuels engagement to make sense of mystery.  Following the energy of an aspiration, bringing it to life feeds us.  Just as food fuels our bodies, life-energy nourishes our soul.  We know it is present because there is excitement, laughter, joy.  People are awake, alive, aware of their feelings.  Or there is angst, pain, discontent.  These are signs the energy is stuck.  The feelings are present because someone cares.  When stymied about what to do with their passion, it can sour, becoming a source of disruption.

So following the energy, whether attractive or disturbing powers us.  Working with upheaval has everything to do with freeing that energy so that it grows towards serving life.

Choosing Possibility

Mark Twain once said, You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. When people tell you what they don’t want, what they’re against, it’s a good time to ask, “What do you want?”  If it has been so long since they dreamed that the question stumps them, perhaps they can tell you about a time when something worked.  So many societal cues focus us on what’s broken, why we can’t, what’s wrong.  It takes commitment and lots of practice to choose possibility.

I periodically teach workshops on Appreciative Inquiry (AI).  The most challenging was with Palestinian teachers in Ramallah.  As I prepared, I asked my host to suggest a subject we could use for participants to experience the process.  She told me that all Palestinians struggle with living with the occupation.  I gulped when I got her message; how could I write appreciative questions about living with the occupation?  It was beyond my experience.  We settled on leadership as the topic.

By the end of the first day, the group had used AI to identify characteristics of great leaders.  I was troubled because they were qualities external to themselves; it was like they were trying to define a better Yassir Arafat rather than finding insight into their personal power as leaders.

I began day two not sure how to bring more of the spirit of possibility into the room.  We began in a circle.  I asked people to reflect on the previous day.  A few minutes in, someone began talking about how difficult her life was.  Now difficult has a different meaning for someone who spends hours waiting to get through a checkpoint, or is separated from family by a wall, or who has seen houses destroyed or loved ones maimed or killed.  Others started to join in on this theme.  I took a deep breath and asked if they would be willing to apply what they were learning about Appreciative Inquiry to their lives.  They said yes.  And I breathed a sigh of relief.

They split into four groups and picked a topic to develop two questions — a personal story question and a future question.  It was wild!  They were working in Arabic, I’d check in, and they’d switch to English.  Each group struggled to turn topics like “resisting the wall” or “fighting the check points” to “Working with the Wall” and “Useful Checkpoints”.   Turning bitterness into productive questions was quite a reframing!

The group who chose Useful Checkpoints found a novel way to test this possibility.  They brainstormed a list of ways they had found checkpoints valuable.  Mind you, this is a HUGE contradiction.  I experienced a young Israeli soldier, just doing his job, pointing a rifle at my head (from a distance) while his partner checked my papers.  Many Palestinians do this every day.  The list of benefits was amazing!  It included: getting to know your neighbors; learning respect for elders (as they help them to the front of the line); meeting new people.  I could tell something important was happening because their laughter was contagious.

As participants interviewed each other using their questions, I could feel the energy in the room shift.  When we debriefed their insights from the interviews, their responses were profound.  These folks, who began the day feeling powerless, found answers for retaining their dignity and power in an impossible situation.

When faced with change, we have a choice: resist it, manage it, embrace it.  Choosing to embrace it focuses attention towards possibility.  The contrast between the fear-laden rhetoric of George W. Bush and Barak H. Obama’s audacity of hope is a powerful example of the difference this choice makes.  As we focused on fear of attack, our relationships with the rest of the world decayed.  Most people found themselves living a smaller, more contained existence, with little tolerance for difference.  As Mr. Bush put it, “you’re either with us or against us.”  In contrast, President Obama began his presidency by reaching out.  His first formal television interview was with Al-Arabiya, an Arab cable TV network[1].

Whatever the circumstance, how we relate to it is up to us. When dissonance is ever present, that choice matters a great deal.  Through most of evolution, changes both arise from and create disasters and tragedies.  Without the meteor that made the planet inhospitable to dinosaurs, little mammals might never have evolved into the dominant species on the planet – us.  Consider the contrast between the devastation left by the south’s violent struggle for independence during the U.S. Civil War and Mahatma Ghandi’s nonviolent, possibility-focused path to Indian independence.  As our consciousness has evolved, equipping us to see and work with the dynamics of breakdown and breakthrough, we have a potential never before available to any species: the ability to choose how we respond to crises, both natural and human made.  The choices we make are fateful, moving us towards a more open, resilient, compassionate increasingly inclusive society or towards a more rigid, walled-in, defended, factionalized and violent society.  No doubt aspects of both scenarios will play out.

Cultivating the capacity to choose possibility is one of the most positive steps we can take towards a life-serving society.  It is also a growing trend.  Geneva Overholser, Director, School of Journalism at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication, introduced herself at a 2006 Journalism that Matters gathering saying:

“I had been depressed. A couple of years ago, I resolved to find hope. When you open yourself to possibility you are willing to experience stuff you haven’t experienced before.”

During the economic meltdown of 2008, Brian Williams of NBC inaugurated a segment called “Making a Difference”, inviting viewers to send stories of positive responses to the crisis.  To their amazement, the station was inundated.  I take it as an indicator of our collective readiness to choose possibility.  And I am particularly hopeful when journalists do it.  As cultural storytellers, they influence many of us.  As they tell more stories of possibility, it may seed a trend that could scale rapidly.

David Cooperrider, originator of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), has given us tremendous insight into choosing possibility.  His seminal research into the relationship between positive image and positive action looked across multiple disciplines:  medicine, education, psychology, sports imagery, and the rise and fall of cultures to discern a measurable relationship between what we envision and what we create.  Even with overwhelming evidence that shows the power of focusing on images of what we do well and images of possibility, there is huge resistance to letting go of problem solving.  More than any other question, when introduced to AI, skilled facilitators ask that ever-present question, “but what about the problems?”

To be clear, I am in no way advocating ignoring problems.  To do so simply causes them to show up more destructively elsewhere in a system.  Rather, our relationship to problems radically shifts when viewed through an increasingly clear vision of what we want to create.  Problem solving engages us in two core questions: What’s the problem? and How do we fix it?  It contains an implicit definition of what things are like when everything is working.  Our task is restoring the situation to a past state (or imagined past state).

Think of Sisyphus, carrying his rocks up the hill over and over.  He echoes the energy of problem solving: hard work and discipline and often little joy.  In contrast, asking: What is working? What is possible? and How do we create it? mobilizes us, filling a vacuum of possibility with joyous engagement.  Ironically, the work may be as hard or harder than solving the problem, but it is infused with life-energy that compels us forward.

Such is the preparation for engaging emergence: embracing mystery – knowing you don’t have the answers while being confident that together, we can find them; seeking life-energy – following the longing of individuals in the system; and choosing possibility: believing that opening to what might be is an act of faith that seeds its own potential.   With such an attitude in place, it’s time to get to work!

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[1] http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/01/president-ob-10.html

5. Hosting: Creating Well-Intentioned Containers

Hosting is an aspect of leadership that is crucial for creating successful conditions for engaging emergence.  It is a style of leadership steeped in choosing possibility, embracing mystery, and seeking life-energy.   The work begins with preparation.  Preparation is vital because change work affects people’s lives and livelihoods.  It is an awesome responsibility to support organizations and communities who wish to engage people in shaping their future.

Creating “containers” — energetic and psychic spaces that support people in learning and working well together — is an essential aspect of hosting.  Well prepared containers are grounded in clear, focused intentions, engage a relevant diversity of participants, and involve mindfully chosen processes and environments that serve the purpose and people well.^[i] Such containers “create circumstances in which democracy breaks out, environments in which it just happens.”^[ii] They enable people to take control of their own situations, compelling facilitators and traditional leaders to move more and more out of the way.  As projects involve more people and larger systems, the stakes get higher and the choices more complex.

Here is a simple way to sense the spirit of hosting. Put your hands into fists.  This is one form of holding, think of it as having hands firmly on the reins, in control.  Now open your hands, putting the little finger sides together, palms up.  This is another form of holding.  Think of it as a field or a container for holding the work of emergence.  Now let go, move your hands behind your back.  This, too, is a form of holding, an invisible energy that ties us together, heart to heart.  This is an aspiration: that by doing our work together, we will feel this invisible connection that is always there.

Complexity scientists tell us that initial conditions are crucial.  They make the difference between a screaming mob and a circle of peace.  The work of hosting is to tend the space, to create conditions that can hold disruptions with curiosity and compassion.  Of the many skills of hosting, three are particularly critical:

• Tuning in: being centered, calm in the storm and bringing just enough storm to the calm,
• Focusing intentions: seeking meaningful futures, and
• Tending to context: mindfully establishing initial conditions, cultivating social fabric.

Tuning in: being centered, calm in the storm and bringing just enough storm to the calm.

When there is uncertainty, as diversity increases and urgency grows, the noise of upheaval – fear, anger, grief, exhilaration, conflict, despair, all grow too.  Feelings run high because people care.  If change has been suppressed or ignored for a long time, people who feel marginalized are often desperate to be heard.  Those inside the system are circling the wagons to protect what they hold dear.  The tensions between an embattled coherence and determined voices of difference are laden with wild energies.  Think World Trade Organization protests in Seattle or auto company suppliers trying to understand the effects of the failing industry on their workers and their future.

Being centered is the capacity to be present to dynamic tension, and to see dissonance as aliveness.   In the midst of upheaval, quieting the noise within, letting go of expectations of how things are supposed to be makes room for insights and possibilities to emerge in an individual, a group, or larger social system.  Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology, advises when faced with conflict, open more space.  There is no better place to begin than with finding the space within yourself, as an individual or as a concerned group.  People take their cues from those around them.  When you show up centered and calm, it brings others with you.

The more we can face whatever shows up with equanimity, the more we send others the signal that they can too.  Tuning in allows us to sense what calls to us, who is seeking entrée, what has meaning, so that we can bring our authentic presence forward, as we ask others to do the same.  Sometimes what calls us will, we know, disturb the status quo — and that’s just fine.  Sometimes the calm needs a compassionately disruptive poke, a little chaos in the calm.

Focusing intentions: seeking meaningful futures

Evolutionary evangelist, Michael Dowd, read a book about directionality in evolution called Evolution’s Arrow that inspired him. He contacted the author, John Stewart, and asked if he would attend if Michael were to host a dialogue to further explore John’s ideas.  John said “yes” and Michael realized that he needed help to pull this off.  He contacted Tom Atlee.  Tom agreed, not for Michael’s reasons, but because this call met a need in him.  He was at a crisis in his own work and while the specifics weren’t yet clear, he intuited potential in Michael’s request.

The work begins the moment an intention is named. It sets direction, surfacing a sense of purpose and envisioning new possibilities.  What is compelling for one person may have nothing to do with another’s reason to engage.  By inviting another, opening to what calls to them, and reflecting on what they discover together, shared purpose emerges.

Through focusing intentions, different callings are integrated into an expanded coherence ready to invite others.  And the cycle begins again.

Michael opened to Tom’s ideas for the gathering.  They explored what it might look like and spurred each other on with their excitement.  They got to work, identifying who they wished to join them for a gathering.  They drafted an invitation to a diverse mix of scientists, spiritual leaders, and activists for whom evolutionary emergence was their life’s work.  Their intention was posed as a question:

How do we understand, interpret, and apply the evolutionary worldview offered by mainstream and emerging sciences, to facilitate a positive impact on the evolution of humanity and the natural world?

Intentions are not static.  As people interact with them, new facets surface.  When there is a quality of welcome, distinctions become a source of aliveness, an energy that carries the intention forward as the purpose continues to clarify itself.  When an invitation captures a broadly felt calling, people show up.

When planning the first Media Reform conference in 2003, the organizers hoped to attract a couple hundred people.  When 1,700 signed up, they knew they had struck a chord.

What are our aspirations, our dreams that give us hope for the future?  Naming intentions  focuses attention towards realizing them.   Naming is never static.  As new perspectives enter the mix, they bring aspirations with them.  Clarity is honed at every stage in which — as we join together, expressing our unique perspectives — we deepen our collective understanding of what matters.  By stewarding this continuing unfolding, without attachment to form, our capacity to hold difference and be connected grows.  And we increase the likelihood of finding answers in which we can all come home to what matters to us.

Tending to context: mindfully establishing initial conditions, cultivating social fabric

When people are invited, it creates different conditions than when they are mandated to attend.  When the invitation is personal, it sets up a different experience than when it comes via a mass mailing.  None of these choices are wrong; rather, they create different initial conditions designed to serve different intentions.  Paying attention to the quality of the experience, providing what people need to know to fully participate makes the difference between a room filled with silent hostility and one buzzing with hopeful anticipation.

Creating a container for the work is as important as determining the content of an agenda.  How do we make our intentions clear?  Who do we invite?  What is welcome?  What of our history needs to be shared?  What of our aspirations?  How about the physical space – what messages does it send?  The questions are endless and all we can do is our best to discern the aspects that matter in any given situation. The good news:  what we miss will show up as disruption.  By embracing it, we learn, adjust, and continue to evolve.

With time, it is possible to grow a network of hosts.  Remember that form of holding with hands behind your back?  When people are invited to take responsibility for the well-being of the system — the people and interactions that form its social fabric — many do.  As they step in, it creates a virtuous cycle of people cultivating environments in which disruptions are embraced as a source of creativity and change is a welcome friend.

The emergence of the Stewarding model of governance from the Spirited Work – an Open Space learning community — put this notion into practice:

At the conclusion of the first year, the four Founding Conveners hosted a conversation:  “Reflections on what we’ve learned about Spirited Work”.  With a third of the community present, the message was clear: people wanted to get involved in leading the community.  This was a defining moment for the evolution of the organization’s governance.  The four Founding Conveners were well respected leaders.  There was no crisis that indicated a need to change.  Without knowing the outcome, the founders listened to the deep undercurrents from the reflections.  They invited anyone who was drawn to lead in the coming year to do so.  There were no interviews, no statements of qualifications or formal process for new managers to be selected by others.  Rather, the invitation requested that people take responsibility for what they cared about.  If they felt called to lead, they were welcome.  The term “stewards” was adopted to describe the style of leadership.  Ans ethic of caring for each other and the whole community continues to this day.  The invisible heart to heart connection holds the fabric of the community together though the group no longer meets regularly face to face.

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[i] Definition by Mark Jones (mark_r_jones@worldnet.att.net), Tom Atlee (cii@igc.org), Chris Corrigan (chris@chriscorrigan.com), and Peggy Holman

[ii] Vaught, Seneca. (2005). [Interview with Lyn Carson, university lecturer, University in Australia.] Unpublished raw data.

6. How Do We Disrupt Coherence Compassionately?

Inquiring appreciatively: asking bold questions of possibility

How do we shape inquiries so compelling that they focus us towards the best of what we can imagine, attract those touched by the questions, and bind us together to realize what we most desire?

Bold, affirmative questions are a bridge between chaos and the creativity.  They mobilize change by helping us envision and realize what we most desire.  They activate the relationship between positive image and positive action by guiding us towards possibility and attracting people from the multiple facets of a system.  Such questions bind together those who care making it possible for the tensions and conflict among them to surface creatively.
One idea arising from Journalism that Matters is “Possibility Journalism”.   Think of it as a sixth “W” added to journalism’s traditional who, what, when, where, why, and how.  The sixth “W”: what’s possible now?

Common Language Project co-founder and reporter Jessica Partnow provides an example:  I was working on a story in little Pakistan in Brooklyn, hearing about the experience of families of deportations, mostly young men. I was talking to that community and to the non-Pakistani community and people felt strongly on different sides of same issues. This was the first time that I asked “what’s possible now”.  It may have come out of frustration as it is hard to have conversations and not get anywhere. I threw my hands up and said ok, “what is your ideal solution?” And everything changed. My contact began speaking of what coming to the U.S. had meant to Pakistanis prior to 9/11 and what he hoped it would someday be again.

Her partner Sarah Stuteville offered a second story:

We – Jessica and I – were in the Middle East, talking with a Palestinian about frustrating, polarizing material. He kept repeating the same ideas over and over so we asked that magic question: “given what’s happening, what’s possible now?” It shifted the interview completely, as our contact began envisioning the situation in a completely new way, sharing his commitment to live a life with meaning in spite of the dangers.

The stories we tell ourselves shape the way we see the world. And that shapes our behavior.  Asking “what’s possible now?” follows the energy towards hopes and aspirations.  While not denying harsh realities, it shifts a story’s center of gravity from hopelessness and despair to possibility for a better future.

Great questions help us face what we resist, creating room to be curious, to engage, contribute, and learn.   Unapologetically affirmative inquiries orient us so that we can face the unknown with a strong spirit.

Picture the scene: there is discord, upheaval, what has worked in the past no longer functions.  Systems are failing and people in traditional leadership roles are stumped.  Even if they believe they are responsible for the rest of us, given the complexity of today’s world, they have no chance of truly having all the answers.  It is a setup for failure; ordinary people expecting their leaders to solve our problems and those leaders expecting themselves to shoulder an impossible burden.

In truth, we’ve been acculturated to this trap, trained by a school system that set an unspoken expectation that we are supposed to have answers.  No wonder we resist the complex situations in which we could not possibly, particularly on our own, have the answers!

Yet, when facing intractable issues, there is ultimately a turning point, often accompanied by a crisis.  It may initially feel like defeat, when we acknowledge that we do not know what to do.  This moment is both terrifying and liberating.   Into the chaos of not knowing, asking a question that invites others to join together in a search for answers provides a light in the darkness.

Bold, affirmative questions help us enter into mystery, creating some sense of safety through which the unknown becomes a source of creativity, where together, we just might find some answers.  When we reach the territory of “there be dragons” at the edge of the map, a powerful inquiry orients us for the adventure ahead.  It creates a safe haven so that when we step into terrain where there is angst or fear or despair or upheaval, we enter with our dreams and curiosity intact, able to stay in the fire with what needs to be surfaced:

Inviting: Attracting the diversity of the system

How do we attract those with a stake in what unfolds?

Inviting diversity stretches us, broadens our understanding of our world.  Think of protesters outside the doors of power.  What would happen if, rather than shouting their messages, they were invited into the room for an exploratory dialogue? Making space for the many different perspectives in a system opens the way for the essence of each unique contribution to be expressed and find its place in a more coherent and inclusive whole.

How do we know who to invite? The simple answer is: those who care; those with a stake in what unfolds.  Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff offer useful guidance based on the Future Search principle of getting the whole system in the room.  They say invite all who “ARE IN”:  those with authority, resources, expertise, information, and need.

Once we are together, how do you work with all that diversity without creating chaos or experiencing violence?  A practice for handling differentiation is welcoming.

Welcoming: cultivating hospitable space

How do we cultivate a nutrient environment that nurtures the well-being and aspirations of all involved?

The Bedouins are known for their hospitality, even when their enemies appear at their door.  A Sufi once told me that if we all practiced hospitality there would be no war.  The thought stopped me in my tracks.  What if my first response when faced with dissonance is to welcome it in to my home – my space of refuge?  There is an ethic Harrison Owen brings to Open Space Technology of welcoming the stranger.  This is not just the unknown person, but also the unknown idea or even the stranger within myself.

While we can welcome someone or something in the moment, a practice of attending to the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs of all expands this idea.  Juanita Brown, in the principles of the World Café introduced me to this concept.  Its importance sunk in at a gathering I attended that opened a session with two people stationed by the door of our meeting room.  As 80 people entered, each was greeted with a few words, warmth, and laughter.  The atmosphere in the room was palpably different when the meeting began.  There was a feeling of openness and trust.  People knew they were welcome and were ready to work.

How we set the stage for what is to come matters.  When the environment supports creative engagement, disturbances tend to show up as far less toxic.  We are cued both consciously and unconsciously about how much of ourselves to reveal, how deep we are willing to go together.

Practitioners who work with emergent change focus as much of their attention on creating containers or spaces for their work as they do on designing the process.  This is a subtle but vital concept that all of us employ but rarely discuss.  You might call it the “vibe”, the energy of a space or a group. Though we can’t see it, we can sense it.  Think of that small voice that informs you when you enter a place or get together with others whether to relax, watch out, or otherwise respond.

Cultivating a physical and psycho-social space with a spirit of welcome that can hold us well is the work of welcoming.  The broader the diversity, the deeper into the subject you wish to go, the more important creating such a container is.

Who is welcome into our midst?  Broadening participation prepares the way for engaging creatively.