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DOI

10.9707/1944-5660.1709

Key Points

The 2016 Foundation Review article “Emergent Learning: A Framework for Whole-System Strategy, Learning and Adaptation” talked about what an emergent strategy promises — to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Has this prediction played out in practice? Since it appeared in 2016, what has the growing community of Emergent Learning practitioners learned about what it takes to seed and grow impact?

This article addresses those questions, drawing on interviews with Emergent Learning Community members to illustrate what EL looks like in practice and how it is producing results that are emergent in nature. It describes insights that have surfaced since 2016, including the articulation of a set of principles that underlie Emergent Learning practices. These principles emerged from the community’s practice, but they also inform that practice.

In the fall of 2022, the authors partnered to launch a learning inquiry designed to explore how Emergent Learning becomes integrated into practitioners’ work, factors that contribute to and detract from integrating this approach, and what impact it is having. As we collected examples of practitioners creating the conditions that make it possible for other things to happen that they could not necessarily orchestrate in advance, we defined impact in a very local and immediate way as observable changes or results that could be attributed to a particular, often very small, action — a “micromove.” Twenty-four interviews gathered data around these questions and explored key themes through three sensemaking sessions with EL Community members. In addition, a set of small stories of impact from community members were collected to illustrate how practitioners are working to make change within their own organizations — not only in the way they engage with each other and make decisions, but also in ways that create the potential to have impacts both across their own organizations and in their relationships with external partners as they tackle complex social change goals and work in cultures that are often not conducive to learning.

What does it take to shift from thinking and acting like chess players to acting like part of a dynamic soccer team — to succeed together; to shift from seeing ourselves as outside of the system we are trying to influence to seeing ourselves as part of that system? What does it take to hold a more emergent stance, where success is measured not by our individual expertise, but instead by our ability to work together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts? This idea has become foundational to the practice of Emergent Learning today.

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