The term Creative Emergence unfolded in my consciousness 10 years ago when observing what was happening an "emergent" co-creative process in which I was immersed with a business partner. I had not heard it before, but something amazing was happening in our process where there was no compromise - where the whole of what we were creating was greater than the sum of both of our contributions.
As I started working with clients using creative emergence processes - by discovery in real time - I observed some reoccurring patterns and compiled "44 Principles of Creative Emergence" (to go in my book some day). Shortly after, I discovered that Emergence was one of the more well known principles talked about in the complexity sciences. That opened a whole new level of understanding - what I had been learning about emergent creativity fit in perfectly with what I started learning about complex adaptive systems and emergence in the natural world - and could be applied in human organizational systems. Then, I started studying improv theater and found the improv principles fit in with both the principles of creative emergence as well as the ones in complexity sciences. Suddenly, things fit more into place in my mind - we live in a creatively emergent universe and these patterns can be found everywhere.
Today I found this article entitled Emergence Processes by Tom Wiscombe at http://www.emergentarchitecture.com/pdfs/OZJournal.pdf. Here are some excerpts:
Emergence isn’t interested in parts; it is the science of wholes...
There has been a lot of talk about emergence since it was ‘discovered’ as a subset of complexity theory in the 1980s, that discovery linking back to the emergence of systems theory in the 1920s. Beyond the journalistic definition, ie. ‘to arise’ or ‘come to being’, as in ‘emerging artists’, emergence refers in fact to a very particular scientific phenomenon: the indivisibility and irreversibility of wholes-- be they structures, organizations, behaviors, or properties. In particular, emergence refers to the universal way in which small parts of systems, driven by very simple behaviors, will tend toward coherent organizations with their own distinctly different behaviors.
The natural world gives us the most vivid, real-time examples - the hive, swarming, flocking - where independent parts snap into formation and take on complex emergent behavior, behavior which is not traceable back to the behavior of the parts. Nevertheless, emergent phenomena are natural in a broader sense, and have been proven to be equally useful in describing the complex behavior of cultural, political, economic, and urban organizations.
Even the organization of conciousness into what is often loosely referred to as ‘intelligence’ turns out to be best modelled from the bottom-up as a swarm of neurons exhibiting emergent behavior. More interesting still, paradigm shifts, or changes of collective mind, appear to also be best understood as sudden coherences emerging from multitudes of independent feelings about the world. Growth and evolution, and the drive toward more complex forms of organization, therefore, are never additive and linear, but rather consistently based on the dynamics and transformative potential of emergence...
This means setting multiple processes and techniques in motion...rather than focusing on a singular formal solutions.
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