The ability to think complexly about situations, problems, challenges and opportunities lies at the heart of the idea for learning in a complex world. And visualising such complexity requires awareness of the way complex systems work. Emergence is a key property of complex systems. It is also, many believe, the key to fundamental change through learning in human organisations. Richard Seel provides an excellent personal account of emergence in organisations (complex social systems). He argues that while emergence is neither predictable nor controllable there are some factors which predispose an organisation towards emergent change. He identifies 10 conditions. Hear him talk about these conditions by clicking on the image (it takes about 90secs to download the video):
1 Connectivity
2 Diversity
3 Rate of information flow
4 Anxiety containment
5 Proportionate power
6 Identity maintenance
7 Good boundaries
8 Intentionality
9 Positive emotional space
10 Watchful anticipation
If these conditions are crucial to emergent change and learning how to change through change, then educators need to take stock of these in their designs for learning experiences. Richard argues that collaborative inquiry offers the best current approach to enabling and encouraging emergence in organisations so perhaps part of the capability and disposition for learning in a complex world is to be able to conceive, facilitate, participate and learn through collaborative enquiry - experiences that many HE courses are quite defficient in!
Emergence by Julian Burton Using the Visual Arts to Facilitate Emergence in Organisations
Julian Burton article.pdf
Collaborative enquiry as social construction