Emergence: The Transformational Power of Connection
For just a moment, suspend what you’ve learned about how change happens. I want to reveal something magical about the world that, chances are, you are not paying attention to. The traditional methods that managers use to generate change, such as planning, issuing directives, and taking incremental steps, fail to consider one of nature’s most astounding behaviors, the phenomenon called “emergence”. While planning helps to steer and support change, the real power in natural and social systems comes from connection.
Joi Ito, former Director of the MIT Media Lab puts it this way in a 2017 talk to the Aspen Institute, “Emergence is what happens when a multitude of things – neurons, bacteria, people – exhibit properties beyond the ability of any individual.” Emergence is powerful, pervasive, and it’s also tricky and therefore planning alone is insufficient to make change happen. Leaders must deploy additional strategies to leverage its seismic effects and avoid the derailment of their plans.
What Is Emergence and How Does It Work?
A useful example of emergence is traffic. Traffic emerges from the aggregate interactions of cars, drivers, and the environment. On a recent Saturday evening, I was driving on the 680 Freeway coming home from my daughter’s birthday dinner. Traffic flow was light, so I expected to be home soon. Then up ahead, brake lights sparked, causing me to suddenly and reluctantly decelerate into the traffic jam that was forming.
No one directs emergence
Emergence is a property of complex adaptive systems, and these kinds of systems, such as traffic, have no mission control. They are decentralized and “self-organizing”. Although, there can be events that instigate change, nothing happens as a pre-conceived strategy. In the case of the Saturday evening traffic jam, the spark was an accident, but what caused congestion to emerge was the interactions between drivers, each of whom were taking local action. When I finally creeped past the accident site, I did what we all do. I slowed to check out the drama. With this tiny action, I contributed to the new traffic pattern of congestion. If I had been alone on the freeway, my action would have had no implications, but because there were so many rubberneckers the traffic jam emerged.
Just as traffic emerges from interacting cars, so do ant colonies emerge from meandering ants, flocks materialize from migrating birds, and thinking arises from the interactions of neurons. Although we often assume that organizational behavior is caused by top-down commands, in real life, it emerges from the swarm of employee interactions, including those of leaders.
Markets exhibit similarly emergent patterns. Popularity trends, sales seasonality, innovation adoption curves (e.g., early adopters, mainstream, laggards) and social media virality are all examples of macro-patterns that emerge when buyers, sellers, and other market participants each adapt their actions based on to what is going on around them and in doing so, influence one another. Organizations work the same way. The structure of who-reports-to-who may be formed by management mandate, but the resulting behavior (including who has real influence) is formed by emergence.
Simple rules and feedback loops generate emergence
Although emergence seems magical, scientists who study complex systems tell us that it forms via two mechanisms – simple rules and feedback loops.
Simple Rules: Joi Ito also said that emergence happens “simply through the act of (individuals) making a few basic choices. Left or right? Attack or ignore? Buy or sell?” Humans have “rules” that direct many of our choices. These rules may be biological in nature, such as “eat when you are hungry”, they may be cultural such as “buy gifts for loved ones at the holidays”, or they may be practical such as “buy when things are on sale”. My traffic jam emerged primarily because of two simple rules: “don’t collide with the car in front of you” and “look wherever the group is looking – something interesting must be happening.”
Watch students prank people into looking at the sky (YouTube).
Feedback Loops: Feedback happens wherever one interaction influences others. One type of feedback is called a reinforcing or positive feedback loop which amplifies the direction of the original action. Traffic congestion forms because of this reinforcing feedback. One car slows down, and other cars respond by slowing even further. Another type of feedback loop, called a balancing or negative loop, redirects the energy of the interaction. As I passed the accident and tried to see what was happening, my view was blocked by a big fire truck. The fire truck served a balancing function, preventing traffic from further slowing. Once drivers realized there was nothing to see, everyone speeded up again.
Emergence creates novel capabilities at each higher level
Emergence is why the statement “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” rings true. At each level of emergence, new and powerful laws, properties, and patterns arise. Individuals don’t have these higher-level powers. Regardless of my driving capabilities, I could never have produced a traffic jam on my own. Individual behavior is fundamentally different from the behavior of the emergent structure. Individual ants can only meander randomly, but ant colonies can optimize sophisticated food forging routes. Scientists can study individual ants extensively, but that knowledge alone won’t help them understand how colonies work. German scientist, Jochem Fromm said, “One water molecule is not liquid. One gold atom is not metallic. One neuron is not conscious. One amino acid is not alive.”
Watch slime mold form the map of the Tokyo subway system (Harvard Magazine)
The creation of novel emergent properties is why understanding customers’ buying journey will fail to predict revenue patterns. An individual customer makes decisions at the micro-level but revenue patterns such as sales seasonality and product adoption are a result of macro-level behaviors. A single gift buyer doesn’t act like a Black Friday crowd. An enthusiastic lighthouse customer doesn’t act like the larger market segment.
Emergence is tricky, (but sometimes semi-predictable)
Some emergent patterns are familiar, as when traffic congestion forms around an accident, and if you have enough data and the right analytic tools, these patterns can be semi-predictable within the bounds of probability and time. But all emergent patterns are tricky. We expect congestion to form around an accident site, but we can’t predict exactly when an accident will occur or the exact size or duration of congestion. Also, we can’t predict whether or how any individual will participate. The fact that I happened to be caught in the Saturday night jam was random. If I had left the restaurant a little earlier, I would have made it home in record time. Retailers can certainly depend on seasonal revenue lifts. They may even be able to predict that investing $1 million in a discount campaign has a 60% probability of delivering $3 million in revenue. However, that forecast will never predict how any specific customer will respond. This discrepancy between macro-level forecasts and the viability of specific deals at the micro-level has caused many arguments in marketing and sales.
Other emergent situations cannot be predicted at all. These surprises many be black swan events such as the unexpected and decisive fall of the Berlin Wall or the overwhelming impact of COVID. Emergent patterns can smolder for a long time before bursting out. The #metoo movement had been around since 2006 when assault survivor and activist Tarana Burke initiated it on MySpace. It got almost no traction until 2017 when it suddenly blew up into a worldwide phenomenon, impacting hundreds of careers. Structures that form from emergence aren’t always successful or enduring. Examples include the fleeting nature of traffic jams and how the internet interactions that spawned the Arab Spring in 2011 failed to move it beyond a coup.
Boost Your Plans for Change with Connection
The power of emergence signifies that simply putting forth plans and mandates without other interventions is insufficient. Our western culture has traditionally focused on a one-way linear view of change where plans are made by people at the top and handed to others lower in the hierarchy who are expected to execute on those plans. But emergence creates a huge crack in the linear planning model because emergence works like this tremendous back-channel force. My plan was to drive straight home, and I had no reason to doubt that plan until emergent traffic obstructed me.
Emergence of some kind will happen wherever individuals interact. You can’t stop it. In fact, digital has increased the number and pace of interactions making emergence a bigger factor to consider. In addition to traditional planning, managers must consider two types of additional interventions.
Leverage networks and communities
Since emergence is such a strong and ubiquitous power, you will want to leverage it to strengthen your change efforts. The Berkana Institute has studied how living systems grow and evolve to develop a four-stage model to catalyze connections as means to foster change.
The first stage is Name. By giving your movement a name, you help the pioneering individuals who can spark the change a way to recognize they are part of something larger and initiate their networking with each other.
The second stage is Connect. Once a network forms, facilitate the exchange of ideas and resources through Communities. Communities differ from networks because community members are committed to each other as well as to the movement. The knowledge and tools these communities create can be shared via programs such as websites and online conferences.
The third stage is Nourish. It’s challenging for Communities to scale by themselves. Organizations are needed to provide infrastructure (systems of influence) to the group such as mentors, technology, knowledge, and money.
The fourth is Illuminate. Big change typically requires a paradigm shift. Initially, the greater audience see it just as a deviation from the norm. For change to expand beyond the smaller community extensive persuasive communication is needed as well as examples of what the new world could be.
Prepare for the unexpected
When leaders issue plans, orders and messages, people will respond – but not necessarily in the way the leader intended, so managers must anticipate unexpected consequences. I witnessed a new Senior Vice President try to reorganize a large, convoluted team. Wishing to empower his executives, he requested that his VP’s collaborate on a better structure. Much to his disappointment, his team delivered an exhausting PowerPoint presentation at the end of the month recommending a weird, cube-shaped organization they had agreed on. Hidden from the new SVP was an unspoken cultural rule in that company, “no one gives up responsibility or staff without a fight”. The organizational cube with its multiple matrixes had emerged from that cultural rule. The SVP would have been better off if he had done the following:
Continuously monitored: Catching signals of emergence early gives you the best chance of responding and adapting. In my traffic example, if I had been monitoring with a traffic-aware GPS, it’s possible I could have taken another route.
Practiced via scenarios: By being present during the collaboration process, the SVP could have guided his team in thinking through options and developing alternatives rather than just letting things happen.
Customers also react to the execution of marketing plans on their own terms. Sometimes the emergent result is success, for example, the 2010 “Old Spice Guy” ad campaign. While this campaign was diligently planned, no one expected that an aftershave created in 1937 would become the #1 all-time most-viewed brand on YouTube within a month. Other times, the unexpected result is disastrous as when Pepsi ran a commercial featuring Kendall Jenner trying to settle a Black Lives Matter standoff by offering a can of soda to a police officer. Pepsi intended to bolster its image as a culturally unifying brand. Instead, the spot generated outrage and ridicule. In addition to continuous monitoring and preparing for various scenarios, marketers can also do the following:
Make macro-level patterns visible: In some situations, analytics provides a new lens to see emergent patterns we can’t see with our cognitive limitations.
Strengthen agile muscles: Having a Plan B is helpful but having your organization and processes ready to innovate options is most effective.
Invest in “hygiene” practices: Hygiene practices are those where you can’t always see the short-term gain, but they invisibly protect against or reduce the effects of bad future outcomes. Investing in customer and employee trust, and in brand value are examples of hygiene practices.
Steven Johnson, in his very readable book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software said, “Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.” Knowledge of emergence gives leaders a tremendous new tool for change.