It has been said that there will be no peace until the person who has not been wronged is as indignant as the one who has. We have taken note of a new phenomenon that gives us hope and the courage to take the stand that this time shall  be different:  that of a passionate commitment to make this pain our own, to learn about and internalize what we are witnessing, so that this stops now. Once and for all. For good.  

It has also been observed that the only emotion in which true learning can take place is love, the allowing of another to arise as a legitimate other in our experience (Humberto Maturana, “The Biology of Love”). May this learning be taken so deeply to heart in every one of us, out of this most recent human tragedy arising from America’s persistent racism, that we commit individually and together to learn how to transform our fear of ‘the other’ into love for all. 

This won’t happen in the abstract. We can only transform how we see and think and act one step at a time, every day, as we make a conscious choice about our next interaction to intend something different; to do something different. This includes dialogue, understanding and appreciating the history and direct experience from which each of us acts; doing things together that promote our knowing each other. We need to actively educate ourselves and those close to us about the history and the conditions that have contributed to these continuing injustices to identify leverage points and actions we can take in our communities to right them. We are ready and willing to bring everything we have to that aim. 

We at 4QP are taking some specific actions to contribute to this future to which we aspire:

• In our continued commitment to diversify the field of Emergent Learning practitioners, we are  experimenting with new ways to build capacity in Emergent Learning that make it more accessible to a broader range of social change agents, and particularly now for those who are directly addressing this current social transformation.
• We are already in the process of building an “advanced practice” cohort that will explore the intersection of Emergent Learning and equity.
• We are launching a Community Resource Center to make available a wide range of materials at no charge that can be used to support shared thinking and learning around the questions that matter to communities most affected by the events around them.

And yes, renewing our commitment to conserving our democracy by voting as if our lives depended on it; and also by actively participating in the exercise of these principles at every level of our civic engagement, learning our way together into the ‘more perfect union’ to which our constitution aspires.

We invite you to join us in these endeavors.

— Heidi, Jillaine, and Marilyn

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A complex system consists of many, diverse parts, all of which interact with each other and, in so doing, create patterns that are more sophisticated than any one part operating on its own. Human languages are capable of an endless variety of meaningful communication, using a fairly small set of letters and punctuation marks, with some rules about how to combine them into words and how to combine words into sentences. Snowflakes are formed in beautiful patterns, all of which are made through the random interaction of ice crystals. Both snowflakes and human communication are endlessly varied, without having to be consciously designed in advance. Human beings are also examples of complex systems. We are composed of many, diverse cells, each of which have limited capabilities. But through the cells’ many interactions, the behavior we are capable of is endlessly rich and complex. If our cells did not interact, if ice crystals did not adhere to each other, this quality of rich behavior would be impossible. These richer patterns of behavior are said to “emerge” from these many random interactions.

As a system, we are also adaptive. Unlike a snowflake, our collection of cells is capable of having a goal — survival, reproduction, comfort, wealth — and to adapt to feedback from our environment in order to achieve it. The same can be said for our immune system or an ant colony. Collectively, through the constant interaction of individual entities, or “agents,” as they are called by complexity scientists, the larger system of which they are a part, is capable of responding to our environments in ways that take us closer to a goal than any individual agent would be capable of on its own.

A complex adaptive system is non-linear. It can be distinguished from a machine, which exists because it had a designer who could predict in advance how a particular combination of components would operate together to produce a specific behavior. Complex adaptive systems are not predictable in the same way. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute, an important center for complexity science, have done fascinating research using complex adaptive systems as a frame, for example, to understand how cities and economies behave.

As we describe in the announcement to our research on Emergence, the social sector has begun to understand that the systems it hopes to impact are also highly complex, which suggests that we need to think differently about what it takes to achieve the kinds of impacts we aspire to create.

For example, complexity scientists emphasize that agents in a complex adaptive system behave according to simple rules and it is through the simplicity of those rules that rich patterns of behavior emerge. A frequently cited example is how birds flock. The rules that generate that behavior are very simple and do not include identifying a leader, famously modeled by Craig Reynolds in his BOIDS simulation. The corollary to that, described by Stephen Johnson in his book Emergence, is especially relevant to philanthropists: “Emergent systems can grow unwieldy when their component parts become excessively complicated. Better to build a densely interconnected system with simple elements, and let the more sophisticated behavior trickle up.”

We anticipate that our research will help us understand better how to think about the process and benefits of emergence and help funders, grantees and other partners in the social sector understand what they can do to improve their impact as they work to achieve complex goals in complex systems.

For more information on Complex Adaptive Systems, we recommend Emergence by Steven Johnson as a comprehensible and enjoyable description of how this theory can be applied to understanding everything from ants to brains to cities to software design. A Hidden Order by John Holland gives an in-depth description of the principles of complex adaptive systems theory.

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