A 4QP talk at Systems Thinking in Action

2013 was a stand-out year for us at 4QP.

Our first annual Emergent Learning Community of Practitioners completes their year-long Certification Program later this month. As we predicted, their experiences and perspective have expanded our own understanding and practice of the craft.

Our rich conversations over the year reminded us of the theory in which this work is rooted. We had the opportunity this fall at the Systems Thinking in Action Conference to talk about one of those roots: Complex Adaptive Systems theory.

We often say that there are two ways to think about the “Emergent” in Emergent Learning:

Most immediately, Emergent Learning is learning that emerges from the work itself, in the course of doing the work, with as little overhead as possible, so that groups of people accelerate their results together by being deliberate about testing their thinking in real time.

On a more macro level, complex behavior (think “mastery”) emerges from lots of individual interactions among “agents” (think “people”). We talk about “rubbing our stories together.” These interactions generate rules that make it possible to interact in more catalytic and sophisticated ways to achieve results in very dynamic environments.

We owe a debt of gratitude to John Holland, a pioneer in the field of Complex Adaptive Systems theory, for validating our intuitions about why and how this happens, and what it takes to adapt as quickly as what’s called for by the environments in which we operate. (We recommend his book, A Hidden Order, for its description of how this process works.)

You can see us describe Holland’s ideas and link them to Emergent Learning and its principles and tools in this video from the STIA conference.

Our wish for you is that 2014 brings you many wonderful opportunities to learn something new and empowering!

-Marilyn, Heidi and Jillaine

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