About the Book

We live in unprecedented times. With financial systems crumbling, oil prices rising and falling, educational systems failing their students, whole industries like newspapers and auto manufacturing collapsing, it is clear that dramatic change is happening whether we like it or not. The pathways of the past no longer reliably guide us to understand the needs of the present, much less the future. Since change is a given, how do we work with it to transform the systems we care about? All around us, our social systems – organizations, communities, political systems, economic systems, educational systems, etc. – are crying out for radical shifts in how they operate. More and more, people are venturing into unchartered territory, re-imagining their systems. Leaders and change agents are struggling to find a compass to guide them through the major changes they know are needed. And since our tried and true ways of changing aren’t doing the job, change itself requires an alchemical twist. Enter emergence.

Actually, the story lives at the intersection of four paths:

The science of emergence – how simple acts of individual entities can, together, create higher-level order.
Whole system change – practices in which conversations among diverse people about complex, often conflicted, topics lead to unexpected breakthroughs;
Evolutionary dynamics – how change naturally occurs gained through exploring the mother of all change processes – evolution.
A pattern language – a means for communicating theory and practice originated by architect Christopher Alexander and colleagues that makes visible essential qualities for designs that serve us well.

This book is about finding the gifts and potential inherent in today’s unprecedented turmoil.