The 3D World
(By John Atkinson)
In the new world, particularly the digital world, disruption is the thing. Everyone is searching for the disrupters, the people who break the patterns. In fact the three ‘D’s are increasingly sought after, ‘ disruption, dissonance and disturbance’. These three ‘D’s are indeed the visible characteristics of emerging fundamental change. But just as a dead antelope is the result of a lion hunt yet killing an antelope doesn’t produce lions, so creating disruption doesn’t of itself deliver change.
What is at play here is the principal of emergence. In its most general form, emergence simply means the process of becoming visible after being concealed. In biology the meaning refers to the appearance of new properties or species in the course of development or evolution.
Emergence is also taken to mean the appearance of properties in the whole that are not found in any of the parts. So an ant colony is the emergent property of individual ant behaviour. There is no controlling brain that issues orders. Order comes from the interactions between the individual ants and the feedback loops these create. Complex systems emerge from patterns of simple behaviour. More comes out than was put in. So much for entropy.
So what emerges is at one order up from the activity you see. An evolution in technology helps generate new patterns in society. The idea that you can deliberately disrupt to produce a particular effect is to miss that this happens without a controlling direction. Nobody planned for the internet to bring forward the demise of the English high street. We are disturbed by what emerges, we don’t disturb to create emergence.
If we are to work with this most fundamental property of a living system then we learn about it through a process of intuition not deduction. It requires us to experiment with how our systems work, observe the results, spot the unexpected variations and enquire further. Planned disruption is borne from what we already know so of itself simply keeps us where we are. The disruption we feel when something novel occurs is our pointer to the new. The real value is when we are disrupted, when something other than the expected occurs and where we have the presence of mind to be genuinely curious about it rather than dismiss it as a useless aberration.
So we can disrupt systems as experiments, but the real value comes when we notice the dissonance between our expected outcome and the disturbance we feel when the unexpected emerges. Only then are we working with real adaptation not pre-planned, self-fulfilling change. Only then does the disruption lead to true insight and so sustainability.