Emergence or Emergency?

I was at an event earlier this week that highlighted the crisis our planet is in: environmentally, economically and morally. Some were speaking about an Emergency, and some were linking this to the word Emergence.

I thought it was a clever and elegant to link these words. But thinking more, I realised it is tricky business.

Anyone who has gone through an organisational or personal crisis knows that times of emergency can bring enormous potential and new creative solutions. Where do these come from? Sometimes we’re not sure – they just seem to emerge.

I would define an emergency as a state of breakdown across the board, caused by changing life conditions and inadequate coping systems. The only way to find a lasting solution is to think in a new way – or, as Einstein elegantly formulated it: “You can’t solve a problem at the same level that it was caused.”

Now how often do we really solve an emergency? And how often do we just patch things up, get everything back to normal, and upgrade our security systems to make sure next time we won’t get caught so easily?

A great example is WW II. An enormous existential, developmental and moral emergency resulting in millions and millions of dead, wounded and traumatised. But the fifties were all about restoring order, wealth and ‘the old’. I recently listened to Churchill’s famous “We’ll fight them on the beaches” speech, which is a moving example of courageous leadership, and was amazed to hear him finish with the words: “And if for any reason, which I don’t believe at all, this island will get conquered, then the Empire will fight to restore the Old.”

The Old lasted until the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, burning bras and University riots. Which was the emergency, and which the emergence?

Truly new solutions, the sort of solutions that permanently solve emergencies, don’t get handed down, thought up or constructed from existing knowledge and morals; they emerge. And the only way anything new can emerge is if we have the courage to stop our current way of thinking and make space for something new to emerge in our awareness.

As human beings we are conditioned to deal effectively with emergencies. We’ve been so successful because of our ability to apply our knowledge consciously and innovate. We learn from each emergency and do better during the next one – which then of course always triggers a next one because we continuously upgrade our life conditions and therefore keep outgrowing our coping systems.

Now the thing is that this is nothing more than a sophisticated survival technique. It doesn’t bring anything fundamentally new. We are programmed to preserve the old through our very ability to learn, remember and seek stability.

This very tendency to develop pushes us from emergency to emergency. We always think that this time we will really solve it, but that’s only because we usually don’t see that our lives are a part of a vast evolutionary process. If you take a step back, you can see that we always need to innovate and the very moment we achieve stability things start going off the rails – because of that very stability, which changes the game!

Now the cases where truly new solutions are found, they usually don’t come from anyone or any place in particular. They emerge, and usually surprise us entirely. When European feudalism, the Church and robber barons had snuffed out any sense of freedom, some religious innovators moved to the “The New World” and started a revolution in democratic principles that, however eroded they may seem to us now, changed the human experience of freedom for good. When IBM was on the verge of death, the first steps on the path of its transformation into an online services giant were set in a hallway cupboard by some enterprising renegade employees fiddling around with the net.

Too often when we find ourselves in an emergency we act like a blind horse trying to use the same solution over and over again, only to find things getting worse. What if we would actually stop and let go of the one and only thing that we put our faith in: the very thinking that we get our sense of security from – and that got us into trouble to start with?

That’s a challenging thing to do – particularly when you are fighting for your survival. It takes real courage, leadership and vision. But I’m sure that we all have at least one experience in our life when taking that risk to not know the solution actually brought about a completely new solution; a solution that came out of nowhere – it simply emerged, you knew it was right, and it changed the game forever.

And I think that’s where the rub is. Linking Emergency with Emergence can be effective in the right context, but if taken superficially without questioning our values we will muddle up two concepts that tend to be opposites: Emergency arising from survival, and Emergence arising from trust.

Unless we are very conscious, extremely courageous and have a vision for what we are doing and why, when faced with an emergency we will most likely descend to survival mode – the very last place that will tempt us to let go of what we know and take a risk. Emergence needs space to arise and dedication to a purpose beyond ourselves and our very human worries.

When I look at the state of the world, the state of the environment and the state of our global economy, I feel overwhelmed. Often I try not to look at it because I feel too small to handle it. But what do you think we need: a State of Emergency, or Emergence?