Engaging Emergence

In this work, change specialist Holman reframes how we deal with chaos and change, and explains to leaders how to turn upheaval into opportunity and renewal.

Shows how to spot the emergence of a new level of order from the seemingly chaotic change that characterizes modern times Offers practices and principles that will help you align yourself and your organization with the new order Features real-world examples of individuals and organizations that have successfully navigated disruptive change 2011 Nautilus Gold Medal in the category of Conscious Business/Leadership Change is everywhere these days, so much so that it can seem like barely-controlled chaos. As a result, increasing numbers of leaders, managers, workers and change agents feel overwhelmed. Some see too many choices, while others see no choices at all. But sometimes within this seeming chaos are the seeds of a higher order. Science calls the process of a new system arising from the ashes of the old emergence. Understanding the phenomenon of emergence can help leaders to gracefully and successfully cope with change and emerge stronger and more purposeful. In this profound and insightful book, Peggy Holman offers new ways to think about the potential upheaval contains as a source of emergent change and shows how to engage it productively. This is is an art more than a science, so Holman offers practices that tell you not precisely what to do but rather how to approach disruptive situations–what to notice, what to explore, what to try, what mindset will leave you most open to identifying the new paradigm as it emerges. She grounds these practices in five overarching principles that apply the scientific understanding of emergence in the natural world to social and organizational change processes. Real-world stories of collapse and renewal serve to illustrate these principles and practices in action. And Holman outlines three questions to help you work compassionately, creatively and wisely with the entire arc of the change process, from coherence to disruption to renewal. This work can be difficult—the end is rarely in sight and the outcome is often uncertain. But it can also be tremendously exciting. Our survival in an increasingly unpredictable world is at stake, and working consciously with emergence is a promising pathway to doing something about it.

In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point, Steven Johnson, acclaimed as a "cultural critic with a poet's heart" (The Village Voice), takes readers on an eye-opening journey through emergence theory and its applications. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT TOP 25 FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR AN ESQUIRE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Explaining why the whole is sometimes smarter than the sum of its parts, Johnson presents surprising examples of feedback, self-organization, and adaptive learning. How does a lively neighborhood evolve out of a disconnected group of shopkeepers, bartenders, and real estate developers? How does a media event take on a life of its own? How will new software programs create an intelligent World Wide Web? In the coming years, the power of self-organization -- coupled with the connective technology of the Internet -- will usher in a revolution every bit as significant as the introduction of electricity. Provocative and engaging, Emergence puts you on the front lines of this exciting upheaval in science and thought.

Bestselling author Sandor Katz—an “unlikely rock star of the American food scene” (New York Times)—delivers a mesmerizing treatise on the meaning of fermentation alongside his awe-inspiring photography of this transformative process, teaching us with words and images about ourselves, our culture, and being human. In 2012, Sandor Ellix Katz published The Art of Fermentation, which quickly became the bible for foodies around the world, a runaway bestseller, and a James Beard Book Award winner. Since then his work has gone on to inspire countless professionals and home cooks worldwide, bringing fermentation into the mainstream. In Fermentation as Metaphor, stemming from his personal obsession with all things fermented, Katz meditates on his art and work, drawing connections between microbial communities and aspects of human culture: politics, religion, social and cultural movements, art, music, sexuality, identity, and even our individual thoughts and feelings. He informs his arguments with his vast knowledge of the fermentation process, which he describes as a slow, gentle, steady, yet unstoppable force for change. Throughout this truly one-of-a-kind book, Katz showcases fifty mesmerizing, original images of otherworldly beings from an unseen universe—images of fermented foods and beverages that he has photographed using both a stereoscope and electron microscope—exalting microbial life from the level of “germs” to that of high art. When you see the raw beauty and complexity of microbial structures, Katz says, they will take you “far from absolute boundaries and rigid categories. They force us to reconceptualize. They make us ferment.” Fermentation as Metaphor broadens and redefines our relationship with food and fermentation. It’s the perfect gift for serious foodies, fans of fermentation, and non-fiction readers alike.

Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal - the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet. Change is constant. This book is about how we can shape the changes we experience to match our intentions using strategic methods that are as adaptive, resilient decentralised, and interdependent as the patterns of flocking birds or differentiating cells. A secular spirituality based equally on science and science fiction.

Engaging Minds: Cultures of Education and Practices of Teaching explores the diverse beliefs and practices that define the current landscape of formal education. The 3rd edition of this introduction to interdisciplinary studies of teaching and learning to teach is restructured around four prominent historical moments in formal education: Standardized Education, Authentic Education, Democratic Citizenship Education, Systemic Sustainability Education. These moments serve as the foci of the four sections of the book, each with three chapters dealing respectively with history, epistemology, and pedagogy within the moment. This structure makes it possible to read the book in two ways – either "horizontally" through the four in-depth treatments of the moments or "vertically" through coherent threads of history, epistemology, and pedagogy. Pedagogical features include suggestions for delving deeper to get at subtleties that can’t be simply stated or appreciated through reading alone, several strategies to highlight and distinguish important vocabulary in the text, and more than 150 key theorists and researchers included among the search terms and in the Influences section rather than a formal reference list.

We are confronted with emergent systems everywhere and Holland shows how a theory of emergence can predict many complex behaviours in art and science. This book will appeal to scientists and anyone interested in scientific theory.

The past decade has seen a profound shift in our collective understanding of the digital network. What was once understood to be a transcendent virtual reality is now experienced as a ubiquitous grid of data that we move through and interact with every day, raising new questions about the social, locative, embodied, and object-oriented nature of our experience in the networked world. In The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, Steven E. Jones examines this shift in our relationship to digital technology and the ways that it has affected humanities scholarship and the academy more broadly. Based on the premise that the network is now everywhere rather than merely "out there," Jones links together seemingly disparate cultural events—the essential features of popular social media, the rise of motion-control gaming and mobile platforms, the controversy over the "gamification" of everyday life, the spatial turn, fabrication and 3D printing, and electronic publishing—and argues that cultural responses to changes in technology provide an essential context for understanding the emergence of the digital humanities as a new field of study in this millennium. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203093085, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.