The Role of Emergence
Adapting to and dealing with emergence is perhaps the most important task facing managers and organizations. Coherence as traditionally defined interferes with that task. We wrote Miracles to begin to address the consequences of the mistaken idea that coherence — in activities, in purpose, in carrying out one’s individual or the organization’s tasks — can be measured by the degree of conformity between the activity, purpose, or task in question and some predefined definition. By restricting the concept of coherence to measurement against definition (what we will call ‘ascribed coherence”) managers and organizations implicitly are restricting their ability to deal with the unknown, the uncertain and the emergent.
We provide another perspective on coherence. Our perspective is rooted in the felt experience of coherence and in the importance of emergence. We call it “emergent coherence.”
please answer WHY adapting to and dealing with emergence is the most improtant task facing managers and organizations (introducing managers and organziations in the same sentence makes it even more unclear to me whose job it is to clean up this ‘mess’).
please show me with an example how restricting the concept of cohernce to measurement… (It’s one thing to hear you say it, another to have an example that I can use to simulate myself / my world in your way of thinking. The latter is more powerful.)
mike wittenstein
March 2, 2008 at 4:28 pm