THE NOW: On Coordinating Change in a Wiggly World
Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence Economy (part 2)
Today, we’re bringing you installment 2 of 7 of Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence economy. You can read installment 1 here, read the entire paper in full here, and collect it on Zora here.
And if you already know this is something you’d like to be a part of, join RADAR.
THE NOW: On Coordinating Change in a Wiggly World
“People are always trying to straighten things out… but the real world is wiggly, wiggly, wiggly.”
— Alan Watts
For decades, our prevailing theories of change were predicated on thinking of ourselves, our organizations, and the world as machines; a metaphor that reduces everything into parts to replace and problems to fix. In this mechanistic worldview, people believed that the future could, in principle, be known; they believed that the more careful your measurements are today, the better you could predict what would happen tomorrow.
If that was ever truly the case, it certainly isn’t anymore.
The future is unpredictable, now more than ever. As we wrote in our first Futures Report, A Future In Sync, “our world is becoming harder to comprehend, tougher to keep pace with, and exhausting to make sense of — as everything accelerates seemingly all at once, at far greater speeds than our bodies and brains are meaning to keep up with.”
Bodies, brains, and businesses too: a top executive at IKEA was recently quoted in the Financial Times lamenting, “we have no concept of predicting with precision what’s going to happen in 6 to 12 months.” Lifelong educator and activist (and fellow RADAR member) George Pór put it more bluntly, recalling an old Yiddish saying in his recent piece ‘Toward an Enlivenment Theory of Change, Part One’: “we plan, God laughs.”
So, if we can’t plan for replacement parts and solved problems, then what?
In short, embrace the chaos.
“When the winds of change blow — some people build walls, others build windmills.”
— Chinese Proverb
Recent discoveries and conversations across scientific spheres all confirm what Alan Watts knew: the world is indeed wiggly. Chaos, complexity, circumstances outside our control; interconnected, interdependent, deeply and uncomfortably unpredictable.
Simply being aware of the chaos and complexity isn’t much comfort if our focus remains on the efforts of the individual. In Western strategic tradition, change is viewed as the result of struggle, conflict, and force. The hero is the one who defeats the odds to impose their vision on reality. Exceptional individuals wrestle chaos, complexity, and uncertainty into disciplined order.
When everything comes down to the ‘exceptional individual,’ there’s only so much chaos one can take.
If, instead, we place our focus on the scene rather than the individual actors, we can transcend these worn out stories of brute conflict and individual exceptionalism. We can get comfortable with the chaos; we can try softer.
“I know most people
try hard to do good
and find out too late
they should have tried softer.”
— Andrea Gibson
When we start thinking about the world as a living system, everything changes. Because when you shift the metaphor, you shift the framework — and bring forth a new world of wisdom that can inspire a new mode of action. As the biologist and author Janine M. Benyus puts it, “living systems have had billions of years of R&D.” Nature has the answers.
“Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale.”
— Meg Wheatley & Deborah Frieze
Emergence?
Think of it as a leaderless bird ballet. You’ve seen the pictures, they’re incredible. Come on.
Really, just stay with us.
See, life self-organizes as interdependent networks of relationships. From these connections, complex patterns can emerge — spontaneously and unpredictably — with properties far more powerful than any individual. In this way, simple parts can self-organize into a more extraordinary whole. That’s emergence.
In all living systems (which, yes, includes us humans and anything to do with us), change always happens through emergence. It’s how reality unfolds: how trends suddenly enter the mainstream, how innovation scales, how ants assemble themselves into living bridges. It’s how starlings do something as improbable as collect themselves into a gorgeous, soaring bird ballet in the sky.
We can’t control emergence, but we can create the conditions for it:
“Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.
This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits.”
— Meg Wheatley & Deborah Frieze
To create the conditions for emergence is to cultivate connections.
Connections are the building blocks of change.
So while we may not be able to create change from thin air, we can enable it.
“Maybe we need to go underground — working in networked, symbiotic companionships, like mycelial arrangements, to generate infinite micro-revolutions.”
— Anab Jain
The Berkana Institute’s Two Loops model offers a helpful map as we think about where to play within the lifecycle of emergence. Here it is, sketched out by Cassie Robinson:
The emergence of any new system, cultural shift, or better world starts with the pathfinders who dare to leave the comfort of the norm to break ground somewhere new. This is the focus of RADAR’s decentralized research process: uncovering and unpacking these movements-in-the-making (but more on that later).
If these groundbreakers remain isolated from one another — which is often the case — their movement doesn’t move terribly far beyond their individual locales. To truly foster emergence, we need new ways to create new connections between local actors and local efforts.
We need to help them embrace multiplayer mode.
On their own, very few (if any) individual pathfinders can affect serious change at scale — no matter how much they’d like to, how much they’ve been conditioned to by the exceptional individual narrative many of us have been accustomed to for so long. If they band together, the whole strengthens each part, manifesting something far greater than their sum. If they band together, powerful cultural shifts and change at scale become possible, even probable.
If they don’t…the antibodies of the dominant, dated system seek to destroy, absorb, and/or co-opt the groundbreakers out of self-preservation. Better futures never bear fruit.
As public theologian and faith leader Rev. Jennifer Bailey has said, “change happens at the speed of relationships.” And yet, today, so much of our infrastructure is built — purposefully or not — to slow relationships down, making single-player mode the default and dooming us to the status quo.
If we’re going to accelerate emerging futures, we’re going to do it in multiplayer mode — creating the conditions for pathfinders and groundbreakers to come together, learn together, and play together; to survive and thrive in a wiggly world.
This has been installment 2 of 7 of Multiplayer Futures: Toward an Emergence Economy. You’ll find installment 2 in your inbox tomorrow, and if you missed it, you can read installment 1 here.
As a reminder, we’re extending availability of our Patron NFTs for those 7 days. If the vision laid out in these pages resonates, we invite you to take part in the inaugural cycle that will bring to life our theory of Multiplayer Futures: Play. It’s the first of many more to come.
See you tomorrow 🔮