I find that working intimately with innovation almost always involves being in – or on the verge of – ’emergent’ settings; and there are particular qualities to this experience. What it feels like to be in an emergent setting tells you something about emergence; and emergence tells you something about what it is like to be in a complex context, more or less conscious of what is going on. Emergence feels like
- you know what is going on and then find out that you do not
- vested interests are so evident, sometimes (often) obscuring other patterns
- problems seem to be circularly defined; there is a sense that ‘we have been here before’
- we behave as if this matters a great deal, yet we don’t seem to care what happens; or we leave ourselves out of what is happening
- there are unclear or contested views about why it matters, although there is no disagreement that it does matter
- experience is episodic; I feel stuck
- there is a heightened sense of risk – and I feel provoked to anger, or frustration
- I am open to attack, sensitised to the possibility of it
- the experience is ‘fractal’ – the same at all spatial scales; and in both my internal space and in the external, organised space I am inter-acting with
- I am challenged to maintain a sense of the ‘whole’; or even believe that such a sense is any longer reliable
- ‘optimal conflict’ keeps things going, without change
When I first heard about it, I was very struck by the theatrical experience – Tamara – in which multiple scenes take place concurrently and the audience ‘divides’ at the end of each scene deciding what to witness next. This process of ‘division’ and ‘choice’ begins in the first scene, and continues throughout the play. The theatricality of my own narrative and the visible and invisible choices I keep on making is clear to me; and multiplied up poly dimensionally when I include you and everyone else in my organisation.
Slingshot