Attuning to the Changing Landscape: Beyond VUCA to Emergence
As we pass the tipping point toward a world fast enough and interconnected enough to be dominated by emergent systems, our methods of making decisions, and the tools available to help us make them, are changing.
-Beth Comstock, former vice chair of GE
While the term VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) that the US Army developed in the 1990s is used extensively to describe the current terrain, my preference is the term emergence.
Emergence more accurately describes the process of something new and novel coming into being through the shared interaction of irreducible parts. It is how large and often unexpected outcomes come about as a result of a series of small interactions, where no single entity could possibly make this same event happen on its own.
A simple example: Riding a bike.
Think of the smooth forward-motion that emerges when a bicycle and its rider interoperate, but neither alone is capable of producing this movement.
A more complex example: Globalization
In a globalized economy, nations have access to increased business possibilities, labor and resources (albeit unequally), but with that access comes inextricable reliance. A tsunami in Asia can disrupt supply chains, immigration issues prevent companies from getting the skillsets they need, and threats to the environment have increased due to overuse for business purposes. These ripples could not necessarily be foreseen, but they need to be managed nonetheless.
Although emergent systems defy command and control, they still manage to result in a coordinated outcome as seen in the above example. Modern businesses need to deal with more emergence than ever and will continue to collide with previously unforeseen circumstances and unknown variables they could have never predicted.
Emergence in Nature
There are concrete strategies for working with emergence which are evident when we examine what happens in nature.
Consider a flock of starlings.
The behavior of the flock emerges from the desire of the individual birds to avoid colliding with one another while still staying in close proximity to its flight mates. Positive feedback by way of avoiding collisions occurs because the movement of each bird affects the one next to it and vice versa, thus creating a totally novel, yet effective, flight pattern that can never be exactly duplicated.
What they are doing is attuning, which is the foundational lesson to be learned from emergence. Attuning, not controlling, is what empowers a large scale system because emergence is symphonic and with it always comes a ripple effect.
Emergence in Organizations
In organizational contexts, emergence is often seen in the way that groups of people work together to achieve shared goals, and how the behavior and performance of the organization as a whole emerges from the actions and interactions of its individual members.
Emergence can be seen in several organizational phenomena, such as:
Decentralization: The way that individuals in an organization come together to form teams and work together to achieve shared goals without the need for centralized direction or control.
Collective intelligence: The ability of a group of people to perform tasks or solve problems that are beyond the capabilities of any individual member.
At this point, most leaders understand that command and control is ineffective and yet, the organizational structures have not sufficiently changed to be receptive to external change. What this means for the leaders managing them is that there is less direct control and the subtleties of a situation are even more critical to understand.
Embracing Emergence
In order to ultimately be responsive to emergent conditions, businesses must evolve with rather than attempt to control an untamable future. Just as the starlings are aware of the contextual conditions that allow for joint logic that drives their responsive action, business environments, cities, and nature are impacted by human behavioral patterns and economic and societal volatility.
The most salient example is COVID-19 as an emergent condition that has had far-reaching ripples that extended from workplaces to the supply chains carrying goods across nations. Researchers predict that emergent conditions will become more frequent and as this happens, business must become more flexible and adaptive, and with this comes opportunity.
Contemporary organizations that embrace this dynamic flux will have opportunities for elevated 1. innovation, 2. resilience, and 3. collaboration.
Increased Innovation
The upside to inhabiting and thriving in a living, dynamic landscape is experiencing the results of unleashing of countless possibilities that come with innovation. Innovation is only possible when one is able to recognize the benefits gained by living in connectedness through resource and relationship. When resources are shared and expanded networks are formed, more opportunities are at our fingertips. Wikimedia showcases how innovation comes from the network effect. By open sourcing the creation of the encyclopedia and creating a shared system, they are able to curate information in a way that is self moderated and constantly refreshed for relevance. It is now common for tech organizations to generally arrange around systems that allow developers to collaborate.
More Resilience
Embracing emergence is also a resilience strategy as it allows for iterative and opportunistic action. There is a regenerative quality to all interconnected systems because there is no one single source of failure. This is how the system adjusts and supports the interrelated components. In comparison, an insulator and stagnant organization is brittle and unable to support anything. IBM is the classic, well-known example of almost going out of business in the early 1990s to re-instilling vibrancy by embracing an ecosystem and consulting model. Their business continues to thrive through ongoing adjustment. Also consider Amazon’s announcement in May 2019 that it would pay employees $10,000 to form spin-off companies that help deliver Amazon packages to build more slack into their delivery system. Creating more opportunities together means a more resilient business model. Resilience is a factor of nature and can also play an integral part in how business organizes.
Expanded Collaboration
Outcomes are bigger, more powerful, and unexpected than imaginable when they are the result of collaboration. Our collective human advantage is truly our ability to co-evolve. Darwin’s concept of survival of the fittest is often misquoted as a biological advantage, but the fittest are actually the most collectively oriented. The spread of ideas, truths, and paradigms is always a communal effort; we are indeed larger than the sum of our individual parts, and this grants unlimited potential when we work together to solve hard problems. Emergence is also increasing across the multiple vectors of climate, politics, and society and this exposes the need to recalibrate how we cooperate. We must be aware that while our individual actions might be small and seemingly inconsequential, there remains the potential for outsized impact on the wider experience in our lives and at work (remember the starlings).
To gain the benefits of emergence, we must first break free from the desire or need to rely on only tried and true answers. Instead we must start to recognize and, more importantly, accept fluid change by building the foundational skill of sensitivity.