(Stimulated by my colleague Rob Paterson’s just-published post on Emergence, I am taking the liberty of re-publishing a piece I originally wrote in April 2003.  I think the issues are still pertinent … just more prevalent today, which is in effect what emergence is all about

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Emergence and Organizational Structure and Dynamics

First, thanks to Euan Semple for lending me his copy of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software. I think I’ll have to get him a new one – I am really using this copy (update .. I did get him a new copy, about thee years ago).

After reading it through for the first time, it seems clear that all of human history is a story of emergence, of neuronal connection, adaptation and evolution of the (perhaps) innate and latent capacity of Homo Sapiens.

It is also clear that Homo Sapiens is now co-existing with a wired (both literal and perhaps figurative) interconnected digital infrastructure.

In the book, Steven Johnson covers all the pertinent ground – where and how emergence first began to be understood, the “tipping points” where it became clear that the effects of full-surround media changed the game for politics, or when interactive online communities and online game-playing discovered that too few rules led to even more problems, rather than too many rules. He also explores the magic that is the human social animal, with our extrordinary ability to “read minds”, as he puts it.

Anarchy, it seems, is less attractive than rigid hierarchy – and heterarchy requires constant tinkering and fussing via negative feedback loops. We have had experience in addressing these issues before, but not in ongoing, always-on real time everywhere. To where will it all lead we don’t know – but there’s a good chance that this time it will be substantively different.

What continues to fascinate me is whether, how and when the critical mass of larger organizations that our modern society knows so well will begin to address honestly the clear evidence that a fundamentally new set of conditions – interconnected smart people and increasingly smart software – demands fundamentally different responses to their environment of interconnected customers and employees.

Oh, the signs have been around for a long time – QWL initiatives in the 70’s and 80’s, learning organization theory and practice in the 90’s, coaching, flattening organizations, turning the org chart upside-down, Emotional Intelligence, self-directed work teams, pushing accountability down the organizational chain of command, boundaryless organizations, and on and on, and on …

And yet … for each of these initiatives, there has been an equal and opposite reaction towards … more control, increased hierarchy, a growing divide between winners and losers. It’s as if we collectively don’t know how or can’t trust ourselves to operate in self-organizing, self-regulating, wise networks that will do what need to get done.

And this, I think, is the deeper message I am taking from Steven Johnson’s book – that the self-organization, the changes to the meta-rules of how humans work together in purposeful action and systems, will happen despite the best efforts of the commanders to effect their will.

It all depends on where you look at it from – 10 feet up, 10,000 feet up, 100,000 feet up or a million feet up. If we continue to remember the profound impacts of an order-of-magnitude change to societies around the world due to a profound shift in the means of distributing information and knowledge made available by the printing press … then the emerging changes to us and our social systems due to the gobal wired interconnectedness will, I think, inevitably lead to an age of wirearchy – a dynamic n-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, credibility, trust and focus on results enabled by interconnected people and technology.

This will be the first age where we are truly, at the meta level, governed by the feedback loops that we create, both consciously and unconsciously. We will be organized for, and governed by, the dynamics of championing, channeling and coordinating rather than commanding-and-controlling.

I believe we are seeing this unfold in front of us, daily. Generally, the people at the top don’t like it one bit.

To borrow some wisdom from a poem that was popular about fifteen years ago, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, I think we all need to learn how to “hold hands and stick together”, ’cause it’s probably going to get bumpy before the ride smooths out.

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