Emergent Systems Can’t Be Changed

Life doesn’t change the way we want it to. Our costly attempts at organizational and social change have mostly failed because we made two mistakes. We tried to change individual behaviors, and we used linear approaches of goal setting, measurement and accountability. Logically, it all made good sense. Individual behaviors caused problems. Complex problems needed to be broken into chunks and then designated as tasks to specific individuals or teams. If everyone knew they would be held accountable for results, they’d be motivated to do the work. And change would happen.

This still seems like a reasonable strategy and is still the predominant approach, now assisted with project planning software and an amazing array of charts and graphics. Yet still our failures continue at an egregious rate. How many failed change strategies have you been involved in? When you think about it, it’s probably a shocking number.

Life changes through emergence, not incrementally. Instead of the simple sum of individual parts, life mixes it all up in networks of relationships and produces something new.

Every part is playing its part, doing what it is created to do, communicating with its neighbors, adapting to environmental shifts. And then, quite suddenly, something else emerges that is unlike the parts that created it. Emergence always presents us with a surprise.

You may already understand this—many people have written about emergence, including me.¹⁹ But I take delight in illustrating emergence with chocolate chip cookies. Consider the ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, water, salt, chocolate chips. None of them taste the way the cookie does; none of them can predict the flavor of the cookie. Yet when they all mix together in the right proportions, reliably and wondrously, you get a delicious cookie. It has a deliciousness that could never be predicted if you studied the parts, no matter the level of analysis. You can’t find a cookie in the ingredients. And if you don’t like the flavor—say, you put in too much salt—you can’t remove that ingredient from the baked cookie. Once you’ve mixed the ingredients and baked them, you’re stuck with the cookie. Hopefully you’ve got a great treat.

In the human sphere of organizing and living together, emergence isn’t this delicious. Culture in any form, at any scale, is an emergent phenomenon. Once formed, you can’t change it using reductionism. As Stephanie’s story at the school illustrated, a culture of doubt, fear, and blame materialized from voicing emotional comments. No one person was responsible, and it would have been impossible to undo what had emerged by asking people to, post hoc, retract their comments. Stephanie had to notice the stories that had emerged. Once she saw them, she knew enough about emergence to use this time to invoke their core identity in order to change the story. The new story she proposed, The Gift, resonated with their identity and reenlivened the community to work together to resolve their current dilemma.

We spend so much time as individuals and leaders trying to undo things in order to fix them and create better alternatives. We were well schooled in reductionist thinking, have done it for years, so by now we’re experts. We change the players, we focus on specific behaviors, we create new incentive systems for the same people. All for naught. The hard-to-accept news about emergence is that once a culture or pattern of response has emerged, you can’t work backwards. There is nothing to do but start over.

We start over by returning to our identity, the source of self-organization, reclaiming what we still believe in, what description gives meaning to who we want to be. The nuns introduced me to the concept of “Refounding,” a process described in Vatican II. Together they spent long hours contemplating the initial energy and inspiration of their founders, most of them teenage girls who ventured to the New World on faith alone. Drawing on those powerful ancestral currents, they could then discern how best to embody these in the present context. I have used this process many times with organizations and it always reestablishes direction and purpose in inspired, clear ways.

This is our work as leaders, to focus within our sphere of influence, accepting the harsh reality that we can’t change the global culture that has emerged. There is no way to unwind where we are. We could have changed the “growth is good, extract everything you can” mindset when we were first warned of the impact this was having on the planet; Rachel Carson’s A Silent Spring came out in 1962. We didn’t. Some, like Exxon, learned in the 1980s of the potential environmental consequences from fossil fuels and switched from science to public relations and false science. Over many years, decisions made independently by governments and organizations, enabled by new technologies, emerged as global capitalism. And now we have this horrifying monster in our midst whose destructive powers are very evident but that cannot be tamed.

Emergence wields unusual power over the parts that created it. The term is downward causation. Even though the system wouldn’t exist without the parts, once it does exist, it subjugates the parts. They now must participate in patterns of behavior foreign to them as individuals. In human cultures, this is easily visible. People adopt the morés of a culture, even those that contradict their personal values. Mostly these accommodations and changed behaviors go unobserved. The culture is in control, and most people unconsciously adapt. Some see how they’re changing but pay the price of compliance in order to belong, even if they don’t like what they belong to.

Yet everything alive possesses the freedom to choose what to notice and determine its response. At any moment, we can use our intelligence to notice that we can’t abide how this culture is changing us, our children, and colleagues.

Freeing ourselves from an emergent culture is an act of conscious rebellion. We know we cannot change what’s emerged, so we walk out of it to begin again. What will emerge as we reclaim life-affirming identities? What new culture will form in ourselves, our families, our organizations? It all depends on the values we embed at the start.

If we embed ecological values, if we focus on relationships, if we position learning as a core value, if we seek to behave as partners with life, then we have a strong chance to manifest, to self-organize as individuals living and working purposefully together in healthy community.

How wonderful to be able to see clearly, choose consciously, and know what to do.