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In trying to understand business in new ways, it seems as though a variety of authors (academic and non-academic) have been trying to apply perspectives from a relatively new "branch" of science that is still busy taking shape: that of
history and issues where he outlined, from his research, the development of
the idea of "emergence" in the literature, and one of the best visual representations of this is in the following picture.
Mathematical and scientific roots of emergence (Goldstein, 1999, p 55) Goldstein defines "emergence" as follows (p 49). Emergence is the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organisation in complex systems. What exactly does that mean?
1. Person 1 goes around a bend on the highway without much trouble, but slows down ever so slightly as she does. 2. Person 2, who is following person 1 quite closely, brakes a bit to compensate for person 1's slowing down. 3. Person 3 sees person 2 braking from a bit of a distance away and so brakes as well to compensate, but brakes a little longer than person 2 does because person 3 is cautious and wants to make sure that he has braked enough to be safe. 4. Persons 4 and 5 see person 3 braking, and so brake just a little more and ever so slightly little longer than person 3. 5. And so on... Eventually, given enough people on the highway, the emergent phenomenon is that we all sit still in a traffic jam. What caused the traffic jam? Not an accident, not any one particular driver's stupidity, but the cumulative effects of
I can't answer these questions yet, and it might be some years before we can effectively answer them, but it seems as though Ricardo Semler has made significant steps towards this sort of organising (see this talk by Semler).
Source: emergence/
http://thanethomson.com/2011/11/14/business-complexity-and-