Engaging Emergence
Turning Upheaval into Opportunity
By: Peggy Holman
Published: September 13, 2010
Format: Paperback, 192 pages
ISBN-10: 1605095214
ISBN-13: 978-1605095219
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
"Change begins with disruption", writes management and training consultant for business, non-profit, and governmental organizations, and co-founder of the Open Space Institute, Peggy Holman in her brilliant and visionary book Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity. The author describes how the ubiquity of change, often resembling barely controlled chaos, contains the ingredients for building a new and higher order system.
Peggy Holman recognizes that the upheaval that accompanies change can be turned into a coherent whole and a vital new systematic renewal. The author calls this process emergent change. Peggy Holman presents a disruptive change model that challenges existing systems and replaces them with fresh and revitalized outcomes. While the author realizes that people fear and avoid change in many instances, she offers hope for transition through a compassionate approach to disruptive innovative change. The usual process for change is one of severe and damaging upheaval and chaotic loss of direction and time. In place of that negative change paradigm, Peggy Holman provides a positive process that guides people on a human level through the entire activity from the initial disruption to the final coherent result. Through a creative and collective effort, people are engaged in the entire change process, and the events are much less stressful and the outcome much more satisfying and sustainable.
Peggy Holman (photo left) turns the entire theory of change management upside down. In place of the usual concepts of controlled change and a managed future, the author invites open disruption that leads to unexpected and more creative results. Peggy Holman stresses the absolute necessity for engaging emergence. Without disruptions, many organizations stagnate and even collapse. The tendency to incremental change and tinkering around the edge, and the illusion of control being maintained, ends in failure to reinvent the organization. All too often, mechanistic change formulas fail to account for people and their emotional and spiritual need during the upheaval process. This lack of personal attention leads away from creative solutions, and tends to end in loss of direction and system collapse. In its place Peggy Holman offers the refreshing concept of emergence which she defines as order arising out of chaos. Because novel in its approach, emergence contains elements of risk, but the resulting coherence is well worth the effort.
For me, the power of the book is how Peggy Holman describes an entirely new technique for causing positive and productive change within organizations. The key to her often challenging approach is the letting go of control and the engagement of the people involved in the process. The disruption is necessary to build a new future, but at the same time people must be considered as integral to that transition. In place of the older controlled, top down change methodology, Peggy Holman shares a holistic concept that accounts for the spiritual and personal needs of the people affected by the disruption. This collaborative style also brings out creative thinking that is ignored in tightly controlled attempts at building a specific future. This letting go of control, and decentralizing disruption leads to exciting and entirely fresh and coherent outcomes. The author also backs her theoretical framework for emergence with practical tools to guide and support disruption and emergence. The book also contains valuable case studies of emergence in action in the real world.
I highly recommend the insightful and groundbreaking book Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity by Peggy Holman, to anyone seeking an effective and humanizing approach to disruptive change within organizations. The entire idea of letting go of control and decentralizing decision making will result in breakthrough ideas and innovations that create positive change, renewal, and organizational coherence.
Read the seminal book Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity by Peggy Holman, and develop a disruptive approach to change management within your organization. Emergence is like no other change management system, and that fresh thinking is the key to handling conflict and the discomfort of change to emerge successfully on the other side of the process. The results from the creative and often random approach will give you clear insights, and innovative and highly effective organizational revitalization.
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