Emergence: a Concept to Help Your Business Thrive
In business, you’re seeking to generate value (particular outcomes) for targeted customers. Duh — that’s a no-brainer.
You design relentlessly towards these outcomes, putting your time, energy, and money behind the vision that’s dancing in your head. The right organization, capabilities, partners, customer engagement, and so on all need to materialize in an ideal construct. When you get this right, your product or service has a chance, at least for some period of time.
Historically, classical management theory has driven so much of our selected what and how in our designs. It tells us to create the right balance of centralization and decentralization in our operating models, change culture step-by-step, and tune technology infrastructure to enable speed, scale, and efficiency of business processes.
All makes sense, right? Follow the plan and be successful.
Except when WHAM! Your design gets punched in the face by reality (thanks, Mike Tyson).
As cliché as it sounds, the world is “more dynamic and complicated than ever”, and your plans for business success will run smack into a chaotic web of interdependencies, competing agendas, and — most importantly — humans. These factors are seemingly conspiring against you, scheming to destroy your vision. We know the world is challenging, but why do our plans fail so often?
Author Mark Manson sheds light on this in his latest book, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. We learn how unrelenting and powerful our “feeling brain” is, and despite our best efforts, how it’s always dominating our “thinking brain”. As much as emotion rears its ugly head in our personal lives, so too in the business world.
Even with the best business designs, we — those pesky humans — interfere. Our feelings (which influence “rational” thought) end up disrupting our grand plans, and then all hell breaks loose. Emotions can drive dumb actions: we ignore a potentially valuable customer segment, our focus devolves to multiple “priorities”, or a healthy obsession over user experience is overtaken by a bandwagon feature mentality.
Come to grips: the best-laid business designs in the world will continue to pit against the most barbaric and mysterious adversary ever known: homo sapien.
We need to aggressively account for this.
You can design all day, and project-manage the heck out of an implementation, but we’ll fall short there. We need to take it one step further and embrace the concept of emergence.
Why emergence matters
We have a unique advantage over most living creatures in this world: we can hold abstract concepts in our head, analyze those thoughts, and then act on them.
The design of a product, service, or entire business model is born of concepts held in our minds. And when we orchestrate all the relevant levers available to us (people, data, infrastructure), properties emerge in our system (business). Examples: customer relationships develop, market share creeps upward, brand identity crystalizes, good culture forms, and the innovation engine chugs forward.
Emergence: the process of properties coming into being, driven by the interactions of the collective parts.
The concept of emergence says that individual parts have properties. And when those parts combine together, they have different — often greater — properties.
These desired properties emerge when (a) you have the right design and, most importantly, (b) key people — both inside and outside of your organization — fall in love with the meaning of the organization. That meaning equates to your why — the purpose your business has in this world. We all know that people need to feel this driving purpose, but the reason it’s so critical is because only then can your desired outcomes truly emerge. It’s just good business sense. Great design without people believing in the purpose won’t amount to much. Customers, business partners, employees, and everyone in between need to feel inspired so that they participate in alignment with your design.
Linchpin move for leaders: ensure people in your organization are driven by a clear and compelling purpose.
When people don’t emotionally connect with your intended purpose, they’ll choose to be disruptive forces. Not always in some malign or even conscious way, but because their instincts (feeling brains) tell them to. Getting people in your camp requires a look at what makes humans tick.
Bolstering your design by understanding the human condition
“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”
— Don Norman, User Experience (UX) design pioneer
We are human beings; we’re alive and constantly feeling, thinking, and changing. We and everything around us is part of a complex, interwoven, living system. Getting desired outcomes to emerge in this chaotic web requires a careful approach, initiated through meaningful human-to-human communication.
The right design considers purpose, structure, and emergent properties.
It starts with purpose. To attain your desired outcomes in business, you need your primary stakeholder community in high alignment with your purpose.
Anthony Giddens, a notable British sociologist, said that a human’s strategic conduct is largely driven by how they interpret the environment. Our feeling and thinking brains sense external stimuli, and reflective consciousnesses kicks in. Certain behaviors transpire from there. To get people acting in accordance with your belief system and strategy, focus on first inspiring them with a compelling and meaningful purpose.
Next is structure. From there, you’ve hopefully earned the right to suggest an environmental structure. Structure can consist of many things: business model, ecosystem relationships, operating model (including org design), product and service mix, profit schema, and so on. This will always be something you’re fine-tuning to generate the right outcomes.
Finally, analyze (and learn from) the emergent properties. Some properties you’ll have predicted, others not so much. Emergence is a hallmark of life; a critical part of dynamic and open systems. To understand the possibilities, you need to first ignite peoples’ desires through purpose and then set things in motion by testing different structures. As you go, you’ll want to understand emergent properties through multiple lenses, on a continual basis. Ask yourself questions such as:
- How clear is our value proposition?
- What are our customers resonating with?
- How is our digital strategy enabling our business model?
- What cultural characteristics are prevalent inside our org?
The answers are telling. Continual red teaming of these emergent properties will bring critical insights to senior leaders. In fact, think of this process as a core capability. By systematically challenging assumptions, exposing root issues, and thoroughly understanding strengths, leaders can interpret and measure the business design as a working system and implement tweaks that bring balanced and positive properties to life.
Conclusion
No matter how great your design, humans will intervene and throw that plan off course. Anticipate it. And get ahead by instilling a meaningful and energizing purpose across your community. Only then can that designed structure take effect in a way where the right properties emerge, and you’re feeling darn good about how you’ve mastered the technical-human divide.
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