Our research into the role of emergence in complex social change is finished . . . sort of. In fact, it’s really just a step on a longer journey that we talk about in our cover letter for the report (p. 4), which you can now download from our website: www.EmergentLearning.org.
When Steve Jobs and his team were working on their new project, the Macintosh, he would motivate his team by reminding them that “the journey is the reward.” From my conversations with people who were working at Apple at the time, the phrase took on almost mystical importance. The team applied it to everything associated with the project — the computer’s design and the way it was to be marketed, but also to how they thought about every aspect of their own work as a team. This simple idea created a coherence around the project that left space for members of the team to exercise their creativity about how to approach their work. And while today we might see the original Mac as horribly antiquated, this small computer with a graphical interface that said “hello” when you turned it on did, in fact, start a revolution in the way we work today.
One of the things we learned in our own research into the role of emergence in complex social change is that, for those initiative teams that were creating emergent results, what they were doing was not revolutionary. They used networks, data platforms, participatory meeting methodologies, and participatory evaluations. What they did that seemed to support emergence was to apply what they were thinking about and learning from their initiatives to their own work in a way that amplified their results. It unleashed agency and creativity in a way that an initiative that had been pre-designed and rolled out by some external set of funders and experts could not have mustered.
It is in this spirit that we started our research report with the statement that we have been on a long journey. Many readers of this blog will understand when we say that we essentially conducted a two-year-long Emergent Learning Table, populated with seven case studies that we continually compared and contrasted as new questions arose. As much as possible, during the project, we applied what we were learning to the opportunities of our own client work, our certification program on Emergent Learning, and to how we operate ourselves as a partnership. We just intuitively believed that we would learn more and produce better research if we were trying these ideas out ourselves along the path.
The research led us to focus in particular on how we use our own learning log and weekly learning calls — creating the space to discover and explore patterns across the research and our own work. Sometimes we would start with a research question but, just as often, we just dove in to discover what struck us. “Have we seen this somewhere else? What do we think about it?” These conversations would lead us to ask a different question or try something out we hadn’t thought of before. The next week we’d bring back what we discovered. We found ourselves asking new questions, experimenting more and returning learning to the system as much as possible. This is changing the questions that our clients and our community are asking as well, and we are keenly aware now that the better we get at doing this ourselves, the more quickly we will amplify learning across our own ecosystem.
Our research report represents where we are today on our journey. We invite your comments, questions, critiques, ideas. We also invite you to share other stories that you think might represent emergence in complex social change. As we say in the report, there is much more to learn . . . always.