Summary
Emergence is what happens when a whole has properties or behaviours that none of its parts has alone, and that appear only when the parts interact. A termite mound is a classic example: no termite holds the design. The idea is ancient, but the word comes from nineteenth-century British philosophy. In 1875 G. H. Lewes separated ‘resultants’, traceable to their components, from ‘emergents’, which “cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference”.
For social change, this implies that outcomes can’t be assembled to order. In ‘Emergent Strategy’ (2017), adrienne maree brown defines emergent strategies as “ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions”.
Rationale
A word we lean on: Part 2 calls deep dispositions “messy emergent patterns”. It’s why we offer approaches and hunches instead of a strategy – what emerges can be tended and watched, never specified beforehand.