Emergence
While spending last weekend on a houseboat with my cousins (-ish, they’re my mom’s first cousins and their 2 kids, my aunt/uncle and 2 of their kids, who are actually my first cousins — see, wasn’t it easier to just say cousins?), I had some great discussions with my uncle Jim, who has his PhD in organizational management and runs the business my grandfather started in Bird-in-Hand, PA, along with my other uncle John. Jim and I were discussing organizations, a topic that I enjoy as well as he, although I most definitely don’t have a PhD in it, but I do see organizations as roughly what my life’s work is all about — building effective organizations where happy, fulfilled workers get stuff done. We rambled on to the topic of emergence, which Jim has studied in detail and which I watched a video podcast from NOVA Science Now (NOVA is an incredible program by the way, one of my favorites). You can watch the 12 minute video here (it’s not embed-able.).
Essentially, emergence is how complex systems and patterns arise out of simple interactions. A couple examples:
- termites have no leader, no direction, and yet build complex mounds with arches (building from both sides) and air ventilation systems
- schools of fish and flocks of birds seem to move together, avoiding predators, turning on a dime — with no leader
- people crossing the street form columns, with no traffic cop telling them to do so (see the picture, which is a screen shot from the NOVA video)
So how does this impact organizations? There’s a massive shift going on right now, as we speak, from the top-down, centralized organizations of the past to new, grassroots, bottom-up, emergent organizations that accomplish incredible things — like getting an unlikely presidential candidate elected. Another great example is Google’s developer team model, where developers can leave a team and join whatever other team they want any time they want. Sounds chaotic, right?
What’s driving our newfound organizational love of an age old phenomenon? The internet, of course. It allows relatively simple interactions and transfer of information between people in ways that haven’t been possible before. As I’ve said before, we’re only just starting to see the ways that the internet is impacting our daily lives.