Engaging Emergence

PREFACE

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.

—Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

Albert Einstein famously observed, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Too often, we use tired change strategies to address complex problems, only to be frustrated by the results. Fortunately, emergence, a naturally occurring pattern of change, provides an alternative. Should we choose to work with it, emergence can take us to a new level of change-making competence. Simply put, emergence is order arising out of chaos.

This book is about working with emergent change. While others have explored what emergence is, this book also focuses on how to engage it. It ...