Managing
Emergence
Marc Rettig
Fit Associates LLC
8 May 2014
UX Summit

Managing Emergence
Marc Rettig | Fit Associates, LLC
www.fitassociates.com
marc@fitassociates.com
Presented 8 May 2014 at Idean UX Summit Austin
See www.ideanuxsummit.com for more information.
© 2014, Fit Associates LLC
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Marc Rettig
Principal, Fit Associates LLC
marc@fitassociates.com
www.fitassociates.com
@mrettig
(check our news section for other talks and books and such,
including our course syllabus and a student-made book,
Fundamentals of Design for Social Innovation)

We do this through…
Short or long-term project work Training and capacity development
Working alongside your
team: moving a difficult
situation quickly forward
through facilitated studios,
or collaborating through an
extended program of
exploration & transformation
Courses and learn-by-doing
programs: equipping teams
with the methods of system
sensing, design, facilitating
co-creation, and managing
emergence
We help teams, companies,
and institutions create effectively
in complex social situations.

This is a work in progress.

I was frustrated by
business as usual.
So I looked for ways
to positively disrupt it.
And now I’m excited!

Story 1:
Internet, phone, & TV provider
Deep research which uncovered
strategic opportunities that also
would have really helped people.
But there were no ears to hear.

Story 3:
Home medical products company
Six years of patient influence by
design leaders…
brought better products and
brand consistency, but no strategic
shift. They’re working on the same
question now that they were ten
years ago.

products
services
decisions
methods
research
communications
budgets
plans
strategies

purpose
values relationships
connection
alignment
boundaries
language
care

STORYwe are homo narrans

Those are social systems situations.
I’d always flinched away from tackling
something like organizational culture. The
thought gave me only fear and a sense of
inadequacy.

My question became…
How do we create intentionally when
our materials are not physical or
digital, but social? What does our
work look like when the results are
not technical or business systems,
but human systems – communities?

My question became…
How do we shift the story that
underlies our organizations, our
communities, our work, our acts of
creation and care?

the way
things are:
business as
usual
the way
things could
be, or want
to be
The gap

(Peter Senge)
The typical change effort…
This is because of what Peter Drucker calls
organizational inertia. The system resists change to
“The way we do things around here.”
As Drucker says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
The way things are
Back to the way things are

The tools in our hand mostly evolved from the
world of manufacturing and consumer products.
Research
Expertise (good & best practices)
Decision-making
Planning & implementation
Iteration
This all basically adds up to
“experts” who “decide.”

Social systems aren’t just complicated, they
are truly, fundamentally complex. They are
complex adaptive systems.
a. They are not causal, they are dispositional. Cause and effect
can only be seen in retrospect, and you cannot reliably predict
the affect of an intervention.
b. The goal is not to make something, but to shift the system
from State A to a more preferable State B. And there’s two
things to say about State B:
• It will mostly be made of the same people who are living State A
• The important differences – the ones that will make State B a
living, resilient, persistent state – will be mostly invisible: beliefs,
identity, care, relationships, conversations, values, and the way
those things are expressed in structures, processes, and policies.

Technical challenges
can be defined clearly, solutions
and best practices often already
exist; they can be planned,
managed, and often predicted.
Complex challenges
(like the ones whose
outcomes are mostly made
of people) are fuzzy, hard to
understand, and often have
multiple kinds of complexity.
Tip o’ the hat to Adam Kahane
Why is it hard?

Actors have
diverse
perspectives
and interests
Tip o’ the hat to Adam Kahane
Three kinds of complexity
To understand
it, you must
understand it
through time;
cause and
effect are far
apart in space
and time
Future is
unfamiliar and
undetermined

Dynamically complex
cause and effect are independent
and far apart in space and time
Socially complex
the people involved have different
perspectives and interests;
relationships affect their behavior
Generatively complex
the future is fundamentally
unfamiliar and undetermined
Systemic
cannot be addressed piece by
piece, but only by seeing the
system as a whole
Participatory
cannot be addressed by experts
or authorities, but only with the
engagement of the people living in
the situation
Emergent
cannot be addressed by applying
“best practice” solutions from the
past, but only by growing new,
“next practice” solutions
This kind of
complexity…
…means our
approach must be…
Adam Kahane, Power and Love

Tip o’ the hat to Adam Kahane
Approaches for creating in complexity
Be Participatory"
Bring all
stakeholders into
the creative &
decision-making
process
Be Systemic"
Address root
causes of
problems, and give
innovations
healthy roots
Build capacity to deal with emergence"
Improve abilities to adjust to constantly
changing reality as it unfolds

I’d love to tell you about some examples….

Some of our sources
• Positive Deviance (Sternin)
• Theory U (Scharmer, Senge, et al)
• Social Labs, aka Change Labs (Kahane, Hassan, et al)
• Transformative Scenario Planning (Kahane)
• Cynefin, Distributed Ethnography, Safe-to-Fail portfolio,
SenseMaker software (Dave Snowden)
• Facilitation (e.g. Skilled Facilitator Approach)
• Dialog methods (World Café, Open Space Technology)
• Theater-based methods (e.g. Theater of the Oppressed,
generative improv)
• Gaming and simulation
• Models of change and transformation (e.g., addiction)

Introducing
Positive deviance

The term “Positive Deviance” initially appeared in nutrition
research literature with the publication of a book entitled
“Positive Deviance in Nutrition” by Tufts University nutrition
professor, Marian Zeitlin, in the 1990s, where she compiled a
dozen surveys that documented the existence of “Positive
Deviant” children in poor communities who were better
nourished than others. In this book, Zeitlin and her colleagues
advocated for the use of this concept to address childhood
malnutrition issues at the community level by identifying what
was going right in the community in order to amplify it, as
opposed to focusing on what was going wrong in the
community and fixing it.
In the early 1990’s, Jerry Sternin, a visiting scholar at Tufts
University, and his wife, Monique, experimented with Zeitlin’s
ideas and operationalized the PD concept as a tool to promote
behavior and social change to organize various PD-centered
social change interventions around the world.
Where positive
deviance came from

Taken from positivedeviance.org

Taken from positivedeviance.org

Taken from positivedeviance.org

Taken from positivedeviance.org

www.positivedeviance.org
Lots of case studies and stories!
Learn more…

Introducing
Theory U &
Social Labs

A chain of people’s work building on past work, from Chris
Argyris and Donald Schön through Peter Senge (Fifth
Discipline), Joseph Jaworski, and most visibly and
productively, Otto Scharmer (MIT, Presencing Institute).
Scharmer nterviewed 25 people with wisdom on leadership
and change, among them: Brian Arthur, Henri Bortoft,
Arie de Geus, Joseph Jaworski, John Kao, Rupert Sheldrake,
Francisco Varela
Adam Kahane at Shell Oil (part of the Scenario Planning days
there, and facilitator in South Africa after the end of apartheid)
& others founded Reos Partners, which has embodied Theory
U in their “change labs” or “social labs.”
Where Theory U came from

Form
tools, results, what people say & do
Structure & process
how you do your work, command & control, incentives
Identity & purpose
who you really are, what you care about,
your core purposes
An underlying insight

The U is a creative journey
taken together by a representative
microcosm of the system

What we do, say, make, use
What we understand, think & believe
Who we are: identity, relationship,
sense of place and power, care,
purpose,… our highest Self
The territory of that journey

Seetogether
Createtogether
Do, say, "
make, use
Understand, "
think, "
believe
Who we are: "
our highest Self
We see our way down,
and create our way back up

Together, see what’s really
going on. See through many
points of view
Reflect together; let go of “knowing” what
should be, turn your attention inward."
Open to “the future that wants to be born.”
Convene "
the system
Together, prototype, "
catalyze, iterate
Establish "
the new

Social Labs, or Change Labs,
are Reos Partner’s adaptation of
Theory U as a repeatable way for
them to engage with complex
social challenges.

Taken from reospartners.com

Large-scale example: Reos Global Food Lab

www.reospartners.com
www.presencing.org
Learn more…

One day, at a global
consumer products
company,…
See the story, “Collaboration and
the elephant that sat on it” on the
Fit Associates site:
fitassociates.com/elephant

We learned to see & listen without judgment.
I’ve omitted some slides from the distribution version of this talk, because the photos show
people who didn’t give permission for this use of their image.
The story in a nutshell
People gathered from across the quality function of the company: design, usability,
engineering, sales, technical sales support, quality management. The organization wanted
to get better at learning from visits to customers’ homes, better at knowing which
customer stories were most important, and better at communicating internally so that the
resulting insights actually led to improved products.
We:
- gave them some training on listening and seeing without judgment
- visited customer homes and watched as they put products to use
- watched videos of the visits and harvested observations onto stickies
- clustered the stickies to find patterns and themes
Here’s the thing: for two days, this group of people stepped out of “the way things are,”
stopped looking at each other, stopped talking about internal processes and problems,
and paid full attention to customers, together. This shared experience completely changed
the conversation.
As groups shared their insights with one another, there was a point where the room got
quiet and two important things happened.
1. They remembered that they all cared most about the same thing – they all very much
want the customer to like and value the product. They all care about quality.
2. Someone found the courage to name the elephant in the room. He said, “I don’t feel
trusted.” There was an issue of trust among these folks, and they would not have been able
to proceed creatively unless they talked about it.
This led to a change in the agenda: they spent the last half day co-creating a new
organizational structure and process for the company’s quality function. They presented it
to an executive right then and there, who gave it the thumbs-up and set in motion the
work needed to begin evolving the way they had been working.
I tell this story because the facilitation plan is directly drawn from Theory U. It can be
applied at large and small scales, in long and short term.

Introducing
Dave Snowden,
Cynefin,
Cognitive Edge, and
SenseMaker

How to organize a children’s party
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miwb92eZaJg

Distributed ethnography
using SenseMaker software

For an example, see:
http://www.globalgiving.org/storytelling/

1. Listen, synthesize, make connections with community
2. Design a portfolio of safe-to-fail experiments
3. Manage the portfolio, using strategies to amplify or
dampen
4. As evidence grows and spreads in the organization,
move some into the business units and/or community
for development
5. Some of those will become operational
While it is still maturing as a practice and a set of tools,
the exciting thing about this work is that it marries data
with narrative in a principled way, provides both
software and facilitation tools, and is one of the very
few approaches out there for “managing emergence.”
Portfolio of
safe-to-fail experiments

www.cognitive-edge.com
If you’re seriously interested, it is worth joining as a member
of the network to get access to the library of methods,
articles, etc.
One place to start with Snowden on YouTube:
Combining Complexity Theory with Narrative Research
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHjeFFGug1Y
Learn more…

Managing emergence
Over the longer term…
The shift from State A to State B – from
business as usual to what wants to be –
doesn’t happen in a “project.”
We are working with two models
for managing emergence inside organizations
and in communities:
Social labs
Snowden and Cognitive Edge’s approach

An example
A hospital network asks,
“How can we increase population health
in our region?”

3 months 1 year ongoing lab &
capacity building
Immerse
Listen
Form invitation
Convene
Categorize situations (Cynefin)
Conceive first group
of experiments /
social prototypes
Manage the experiments
Regular sensing
Amplify & dampen per strategy
Move to pilot, design & development as appropriate
Convene as appropriate
New experiments as appropriate
Build community & organizational capacity
to create together & manage emergence
U-journey with leadership
to help them shift “business as usual”

Key ingredients in these approaches
1. Convene diversity and influence
(convening is a major step!)
2. Create space: not “business as usual,” open, safe
3. Facilitate experience + reflection:
open, let go, reframe,…
4. Manage portfolios of experiments
Bold & diverse, managed, monitored,
amplify and dampen
5. Iterate, remaining grounded in “the deep”
and open to what emerges
6. Cultivate the community’s creative and adaptive
capacity, nurture the conditions for it to develop and
adapt on its own

Key characteristics
New community story rather than “solution”
Design with rather than for
Catalyze rather than solve
Facilitator-partner rather than expert
Emergence rather than plan-and-execute
Invisible materials
Approach must give us dance steps for uncertainty,
which will never go away – social systems are inherently
uncertain, non-causal
Your whole Self is required, not just your brain & hands

I believe a new practice is
being born – the practice of
creating intentionally in
and with the complexity of
human communities.
Personally, I feel my work is to advance
that practice. If you feel excited and
scared by these ideas,…
Evidence of this practice can be found in:
- university programs like dsi.sva.edu and CMU Design’s new curriculum.
- firms like Reos Partners and Cognitive Edge
- the blooming trend in social entrepreneurship
- management conversations such as Moonshots for Management
- trends in human development practices, from positive deviance to Paul Polack to shifts in
the ways foundations are managing their investments
- the way design, social innovation, dialog facilitation, living systems, management, development, and
many other practices are in a conversation that did not exist five years ago.

Welcome to the frontier.

Thank you.
marc@fitassociates.com
www.fitassociates.com
@mrettig