Jean talked about the shifts in mindsets at the individual and team levels that accompany a deep experience and emergence. While the activity of ideation and its walls are brightly-colored poster it gets us excited, emergence the spontaneous appearance of order out of apparent randomness may seem foreign to most of us. It's hard to define, even harder to see, and requires us to relinquish control and let ideas come to us. To learn more, we look at chaos theory and complex adaptive systems. Research dating back to 1875, supports a well shared phenomena, that outcomes can be greater or more complex than just the assembly of individual components. Scientists at the Santa Fe Institute call this transformational occurrence emergent complexity. The concept of emergence also appears in philosophy, systems theory, and art, but the foundational idea remains the same, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We even see this in biological practices surrounding the principle of self-organizing. Take an ant colony, for example. When observing ant colonies, writer Stephen Johnson found that unintelligent individual ants, when given direction from the queen, produce intelligent systems, whole colonies. He relates this to humans, stating that individuals building off of the ideas of others has led to new technologies, towns, democracies, and much more than we could have accomplished individually. Emergence comes from our abilities to adapt and evolve over time, always moving forward towards new possibilities. Part of our ability to do so within DT and beyond lies in the variety of experiences diverse teams bring to the table. To adapt successfully to the diversity of challenges in our environment, we must, as a whole, have the same level of diversity represented in our experiences. This is the law of requisite variety. Adaptation relies not only on having variety in general, but having the right type of skills and experiences to match the current situation. For instance, my coauthors and I have decades of experience in strategy and design work, but that wouldn't help us if say, the air conditioning unit broke. We'd likely unsuccessfully push a few buttons and then call for reinforcements so that our collective competency with a skilled technician now on our team, would match the specifics of the challenge. As we bring these two principles of emergence and requisite variety together, the message for innovation is clear. The diversity of the experience-based for group must match or exceed the complexity of the problem that faces in order for higher-order solutions to emerge. But having the right variety of skills doesn't automatically make the magic happen. We have to ask the right types of questions. In DT, we often ask ourselves, what if anything were possible? Such a positive focus, psychologists argue, motivates a group to see more creative alternatives instead of feeling bound by constraints. It creates a larger space for envisioning truly creative solutions. Positive thinking is essential to emergence. Researchers explain that positive emotions affect our brains differently than negative emotions in a broaden and build effect. Negative emotions limit our perspective and cause us to narrow our views to what we already know, but positive emotions encourage exploration, remove risk, and expand our worldviews and how we view ourselves. They broaden our ability to look for creative, flexible and unpredictable ways of thinking and acting, and they build our ability to make more connections between ideas. Positivity now increases our ability to be positive tomorrow, making us continually more open to explore and accept what emerges and gives us a safe space to bring our best selves into the conversation. But getting breakthrough ideas takes time and we must resist the urge to abandon the ambiguity for the comfort of compromise. Much like DT holds us in the problem space during the immersion and sense-making to yield better understanding of the problem, emergence requires staying in the possibility space if we want truly transformational solutions. Staying in this space is quite challenging and as innovators, we are constantly at war over the urge to satisfice. Economist Herbert Simon coined satisficing as the process of selecting the least worst solution to which everyone will agree, which helps productivity in the short-term, but stifles innovation and creativity. Left unmanaged, this leads groups to settle on options that avoid arguments and save resources, time and energy, jumping to a simple, clear solution. But as journalist H.L. Mencken describes, "For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Satisficing too early sacrifices creativity and value creation for something good enough. Higher-order solutions emerge when the group finds higher ground, not common ground. By prematurely compromising and settling, satisficing brings everyone's creativity down to the least common denominator. While satisficing is about taking control of the process, the last point about the science behind emergence is about relinquishing control. Scholars of Western and Eastern philosophies preach the importance of letting go of the process and letting come higher-order solutions. Physicist W. Brian Arthur describes that in order for new possibilities to come or to emerge from initial ideas, we must observe, reflect, and be patient. To set the stage for this, he recommends doing exactly what we started with in DT, immersed in places that matter most to observe and listen. His next suggestion, retreat and reflect. Finding a place of silence to allow new knowledge to come to us. Otto Scharmer describes a similar journey called presencing. Letting go of biases, assumptions, and ownership of ideas so we can let come new concepts. For this to happen, we must listen with an open heart and open will to connect to the higher future possibilities while letting go of non-essential biases and thoughts. With a heightened level of energy and a sense of future possibility, we cease to force or control our outcomes, but instead, invite whatever emerges.
