Engaging Emergence —
I’ve just received Peggy Holman’s terrific new book Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity.
This is the sort of easy-to-read book that you want to leave lying around so others will find it accidentally. Maybe they’ll recognise, as Peggy hopes, that modern life is not a predictable, steady state that is occasionally and annoyingly disrupted. Rather, life should be celebrated as an evolution of surprises, change and adaptation. Peggy provides us with a straightforward roadmap about how to constructively steward positive change.
But it won’t be easy because we have to toss aside some culturally-engrained habits of thought. For example, uncertainty and being “out of control” should be accepted as relatively normal instead of as definitively bad. And “change management” is just an oxymoron.
She begins by describing emergent complexity, which I’ll short-hand as the self-reconfiguration of a system in response to evolving needs. For the past quarter century, the narrative around human social complexity has gained public currency. But the apparent inevitability of complex change, perceived from the deterministic paradigm, still leaves people feeling victimised.
Peggy’s book invites us to advance our thinking beyond merely coping with the unpredictable states that emerge out of complexity. We can construct our futures, but it requires an approach that differs from the simple cause-and-effect model with which we are most familiar. Peggy outlines the benefits, characteristics, dynamics and principles of engaging emergence.
The book is aimed particularly at people who are in a position to affect change in organisations or institutions. At the heart of the book is a moral and prescriptive five-step practice for engaging emergence:
- Step up. Take responsibility for what you love as an act of service.
- Prepare. Get ready for newness.
- Host. In a safe environment, welcome diversity and focus intentions.
- Step in. Inquire appreciatively, explore alternatives and identify new patterns.
- Iterate. Don’t stop.
Peggy uses stories about her personal and professional transformation from software engineer (I can relate to that!) to change facilitator to elaborate and illustrate many of the ideas, and adds useful stories from her colleagues. The five steps are essentially the core of many existing group processes such as Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search and World Café which are summarised at the end of the book.
Engaging emergence requires that we talk to one another in a civil manner with mutual commitment. Perhaps wisely she has sidestepped the thorny challenge of motivating people who exercise power to graciously and generously devolve their authority to a shared enterprise. The book presumes that a situation where the practice can be exercised poses no political barriers to emergent change. Unfortunately, this would be a rare occurrence. So just like the enterprise of deliberative democracy, which requires the practice of engaging emergence, the initial challenge is just getting to step 1.
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Nice write-up! Just ordered my copy.
I greatly enjoyed the workshop “The Underlying Dynamics of Conversations that Matter” (http://www.thataway.org/events/?page_id=93) she gave with Tom Atlee at the 2008 NCDD conference in Austin, TX. I’m sure some of it made its way into her new book.
Posted by Tim Bonnemann 30 September 2010 06:43 pm | link
Ron –
Thanks for your reflections on Engaging Emergence. I’m delighted at your enthusiastic response!
And I want to comment on the challenge you raised of motivating people with power. There are virtually always political barriers! Shame on me that I wasn’t more explicit on how to address them.
What I have found to be true is that when the issue faced is more important than their position, people in power positions will engage. In other words, they’ll step up when:
* the situation reaches the point that they realize that they can’t solve it alone;
* it is critical to their success; and
* they’ve found a partner to work with that they’re willing to trust.
Essentially, these are the conditions when anyone will engage. It’s just that people with more to lose tend to wait longer. By then, the situation is really messy and they’re desperate.
I’ve experienced this shift in government agencies, like the National Institute of Corrections (NIC), and in organizations, like the Boeing Company. As Chris Innes of NIC put it so eloquently, they stepped up to “make it up as they went along” when doing the same old thing was not worth the trouble.
Posted by Peggy Holman 05 October 2010 06:47 am | link
Peggy, thanks for your elaboration regarding motivations to stepping up. It also points our community of practice to work harder to generate opportunities using the non-instrumental language you recommend. ps, I’ve posted sections of my review to Amazon for you! Best of success!
Posted by Ron Lubensky 05 October 2010 10:18 am | link