Designing for Emergence

Designing for emergence

In his 2007 Harvard Business Review article with Mary Boone, Dave Snowden described a complex context this way:

“In a complicated context, at least one right answer exists. In a complex context, however, right answers can’t be ferreted out. It’s like the difference between, say, a Ferrari and the Brazilian rainforest. Ferraris are complicated machines, but an expert mechanic can take one apart and reassemble it without changing a thing. The car is static, and the whole is the sum of its parts. The rainforest, on the other hand, is in constant flux – a species becomes extinct, weather patterns change, an agricultural project reroutes a water source – and the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. This is the realm of “unknown unknowns.”

My colleague and friend John Rendon, who works on these kinds of problems at the scale of governments and nations, has said:

“Complex problems change when you look at them, when you talk with them, and when you engage with them. Interactions are nonlinear and disproportionate; minor changes can have major consequences.” (5)

And so:

“The objective is to attain some ability to ‘steer’ the complex system. But how do we steer a system through a complex, tangled web of interactions?” (6)

Whether applied to self-organized forms of matter-energy or to the unplanned results of human agency, new concepts of (non-linear causality and self-organization) demand a new methodology... a more experimental attitude toward reality and an increased awareness of the potential for self-organization inherent in even the humblest forms of energy. (7)

Designing for emergence means introducing changes into a system already in motion. The aim is to influence how it organizes itself through a set of interacting mechanisms. Here the focus is on complex adaptive systems (CAS) that involve people: settings where participants respond to one another and where wicked problems arise.

A desired future gives the work direction, but a complex system will not necessarily follow a fixed plan. Start by understanding its present relationships and how past events shaped them. Choose mechanisms that might move it toward the desired state, then treat the proposed path as provisional. Revise it as participants respond and conditions change.

Work where the system’s exchanges and negotiations actually happen. A policy or tool changes those interactions and may have effects beyond its immediate purpose. Even a small move can have a large effect, so observing the response is part of the design work.

How to do this?

In a keynote talk at the RSD4 Systemic Design conference 2015, Don Norman, Director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego, provided a thorough and clear definition of complex problems. He then referenced the Yale Economist Charles Lindblom’s concept of ‘muddling through’ as the most effective approach for working on complex problems. Seemingly a surrender to complexity, ‘muddling through’ for Lindblom is not a lack or failure of method, but a system of successive incremental changes – successive small maneuvers that one can do quickly and then assess to move on. The value in Lindblom’s process is that doing real work in the system is the means for making progress. Designing for emergence adds an explicit interest in how those changes interact and produce patterns across the system.

In Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World, John Seely Brown and I elucidate principles and tools for doing this in the chapter devoted to “Designing for Emergence.” We begin by referencing John Holland’s framework of four characteristics that belong to the phenomenon of emergence to talk about mechanisms and systems of mechanisms that work with those characteristics – these are ecologies of change. (8)