Are you looking for ways to better understand the complexity of the world around you? Are you finding it increasingly difficult to navigate through all the unexpected challenges, changes and unpredictable dynamics? If so, then understanding emergence could be your answer.
Emergence is a concept that systems thinkers have used for years as a means of exploring and gaining insight into how complex behaviour arises from seemingly simple interactions within an environment. In this article, we’ll explore what emergence is in greater detail and outline key ideas associated with its core principles.
Prolific British psychologist G. H. Lewes was the first to bring attention to the principles of emergent behavior with his multivolume work, problems of life and mind (Corning, 2002).
The philosophy behind emergence or emergent properties is that complex systems exhibit novel properties and behaviours that cannot be reduced to or explained by the properties of their individual components or parts. Emergent properties are properties that arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts of a system and cannot be predicted or fully understood by analyzing each part in isolation.
The idea of emergence challenges reductionism, which suggests that complex systems can be understood by breaking them down into their individual parts and studying them in isolation. Instead, emergent properties suggest that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and understanding complex systems requires understanding the relationship between the parts and how they interact with one another.
Emergence is what “self-organizing” processes produce (Corning, 2002) and refers to the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems as shown in figure 1.
Emergent phenomena are conceptualized as occurring on the macro level, in contrast to the micro-level components and processes out of which they arise. (Goldstein, 1999). It is a fundamental concept and can be observed in a wide range of systems, from mechanical, biological domains all the way up to its appearance in cultural and political spheres and accounts for the presence of hurricanes, ecosystems, complex organisms like humans, and also phenomena like traffic congestion and organization culture.
