Part I: A Theory of Engaging Emergence « Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity

Part I: A Theory of Engaging Emergence « Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity: "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)"