Understanding Emergent Change: A New Paradigm for Leadership
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It's one thing to change a light bulb. It's something different to change a system.
As more business leaders recognize that yesterday's leadership strategies won't work tomorrow, we are transitioning away from outdated strategic planning methodologies to embrace the new paradigm of "Emergent Change."
Through my consulting work with organizations across industries, I'm building awareness around Emergent Change and helping leaders integrate this practice into their work, allowing them to bring greater adaptability, innovation, and emotional intelligence into their businesses.
Contact me to learn more about implementing Emergent Change in your organization
What is Emergent Change?
Emergence is the process of order arising from chaos. This idea has long been the foundation of many exploratory fields—from science to art, social dynamics to human relationships.
Emergent Change translates this concept to an organizational context. It's based on the understanding that change is a continuous, open-ended, and unpredictable process of aligning and realigning an organizational system to its constantly evolving environment.
Organizations in sectors that prize exploration and discovery—including technology, science, design, and engineering—have been utilizing Emergent Change processes for years. Recently, Emergent Change has reached the highest levels of organizational leadership as executives recognize that the old paradigm of "planning" change on 3, 5, or even 10-year cycles no longer suits a marketplace evolving at an exponential rate.
How Emergent Change Looks in Practice
Two widely recognizable examples of Emergent Change in action are Netflix and Amazon.
Netflix first began competing with Blockbuster by sending rental DVDs through the mail. Fifteen years later, Netflix competes with major Hollywood studios by generating the type of content it once shipped. This transformation was never part of the original "plan."
Similarly, Amazon began as an online bookstore competing with Barnes & Noble. Today, its portfolio includes e-commerce, cloud computing, streaming, AI, and more—a remarkable evolution from selling paperbacks!
While not every organization that employs Emergent Change will achieve this scale, there are similarities in mindset and practice that companies of all sizes can apply:
An Emergent Change practitioner simultaneously focuses on:
Achieving current goals and objectives
Innovating new goals and objectives
Sunsetting outdated goals and objectives
This dynamic sense of ongoing movement exemplifies Emergent Change and points to the leadership systems, interpersonal skills, and inner worldview that the process requires.
What Emergent Change Requires From Executives
In traditional top-down change models, executive leaders can ask others to change without having to change themselves.
In Emergent Change, leaders must embody the transformation process to a much greater degree, developing familiarity and even intimacy with the uncertainty, disorientation, and fear that the process naturally involves.
Words like "uncertainty," "disorientation," and "fear" have historically been uncommon in corporate boardrooms. However, as executives increasingly recognize the need for adaptability, resilience, and innovation, they're realizing these qualities require a fundamentally different management approach.
Emergent Change begins with an internal shift in perspective that often ripples beyond business into leaders' personal worlds. Accordingly, this approach requires greater wisdom and creativity from leaders, empowering them to work with higher-order complexity.
Emergent Change generates not just creative solutions but an entirely higher order of solution-finding. It brings to mind Einstein's famous quote: "We can't solve our problems with the same thinking we used when creating them."
Transformational Intelligence™: The Foundation for Emergent Change
To navigate Emergent Change effectively, leaders need to develop what I call Transformational Intelligence™ — an integrated capability that goes beyond traditional notions of IQ or even emotional intelligence.
Transformational Intelligence™ represents the integration of four essential intelligence domains:
Analytical Intelligence: The ability to process information logically, identify patterns, and develop coherent strategies
Emotional Intelligence: Self-awareness and the capacity to recognize and regulate emotions in yourself and others
Social Intelligence: The skill to navigate relationships, communicate effectively, and build collaborative environments
Creative Intelligence: The capacity to imagine new possibilities, make novel connections, and develop innovative solutions
When these four intelligence domains work together, they create a new foundation for organizational evolution in constantly changing environments.
Leaders with high Transformational Intelligence™ can hold seemingly contradictory ideas simultaneously, remain calm amid uncertainty, create meaning through compelling narratives, and envision possibilities that others cannot yet see.
This multi-dimensional intelligence allows leaders to transform not just what they do, but how they think about what they do — a critical capability for organizations navigating the complexity of Emergent Change.
How To Recognize When It's Time to Shift to Emergent Change
Some Emergent Change engagements are precipitated by sudden interruptions to "business as usual"—such as rapid growth, acquisitions, layoffs, or market disruptions.
However, the majority of my client engagements begin with a more subtle sense that "something better is possible"—without a specific problem to point to or even a clear vision of what "better" might mean.
This sense is often related to a less dramatic interruption—perhaps a leadership transition or a shift in an executive's personal perspective. Whatever the cause, the overall system has been knocked out of balance.
Common symptoms include:
Cycling through the same leadership approaches repeatedly
Feeling like there is "no solution" to current challenges
Experiencing organizational stuckness, anxiety, or burnout
Sensing chaos or dread even during otherwise positive changes
An Emergent Change process can release this stuck energy and revitalize innovation.
Phase Zero™: The Essential First Step in Emergent Change
Most transformation efforts fail because they begin with assumptions rather than understanding. That's why I developed Phase Zero™ — a comprehensive diagnostic process that happens BEFORE making recommendations or initiating change.
Unlike traditional consulting approaches that often start with predefined solutions, Phase Zero™ creates space for discovery and emergence. It's specifically designed to surface the invisible dynamics, unspoken assumptions, and hidden opportunities that traditional assessments miss.
The Phase Zero™ process typically involves:
Deep immersion in your organizational context through stakeholder interviews and observation
Systems mapping to visualize the complex relationships and dynamics at play
Narrative exploration to uncover the stories that shape your organizational reality
Future visioning exercises that bypass current constraints to imagine new possibilities
The outcome is not a rigid plan, but rather a set of emergent pathways that honor both where your organization is today and where it might evolve. This approach creates the conditions for organic, sustainable transformation rather than forced change.
By starting with Phase Zero™, organizations avoid the common trap of implementing solutions to problems they don't fully understand, and instead develop the capacity to navigate complexity with greater wisdom and creativity.
What an Emergent Change Process Looks Like
In my client work, we begin every engagement with a Discovery process, regardless of the specific challenge clients initially present.
The Discovery process has these intentions:
To help executives unravel the complexity of their challenges and uncover root causes
To facilitate perspective shifts that reveal solutions outside previously considered options
To guide understanding of what integrating these solutions will require of leaders and their organizations
To educate about Emergent Change and help conceptualize individualized skill development journeys
Importantly, Emergent Change does not begin with "the solution" as in traditional change management. Instead, it focuses on creating environments where unexpected solutions are likely to emerge—similar to preparing fertile soil for a garden.
For example, in my consulting practice, I don't design solutions and present them to clients. Instead, I guide clients through their own innovation processes, allowing solutions to emerge from our collaboration. This approach demonstrates Emergent Change in action, teaching by example and helping clients develop the mindsets and "heartsets" this practice requires.
This approach can initially feel disruptive for executives accustomed to thinking in terms of clear problems and solutions. However, most practitioners ultimately find the process deeply creative and energizing, with positive effects that extend throughout their professional and personal lives.
Strategic Backcasting: A Tool for Navigating Emergent Change
One of the key methodologies I use within the Emergent Change framework is Strategic Backcasting. Unlike traditional forecasting that projects current trends forward, Strategic Backcasting starts by envisioning a desired future state and then works backward to identify the steps needed to get there.
This approach is particularly powerful within Emergent Change because it:
Liberates thinking from current constraints and assumptions
Creates a creative tension between present reality and future possibilities
Provides direction without prescribing a rigid path
Integrates all four dimensions of Transformational Intelligence™
Strategic Backcasting gives leaders a practical tool for navigating the complexity of Emergent Change while maintaining focus on meaningful transformation.
Begin Your Emergent Change Journey
Are you sensing that your organization needs a different approach to change? Are traditional planning methods failing to deliver the innovation and adaptability your business requires?
Schedule a Phase Zero™ discovery conversation to explore how Emergent Change principles might transform your leadership approach and organizational culture.
A masterful narrative consultant, leadership coach, and systems change facilitator, Jordan Bower helps corporate, non-profit, and entrepreneurs leaders create meaningful change through workshops, consulting, coaching and keynote speaking.
