[MUSIC] In this segment, we're going to talk about the principle of emergence, as the alternative to bureaucracy. We can coordinate through, bureaucracy through procedures. Or we can coordinate through emergence. So what is emergence? Let me just give you some dictionary definitions before we kind of get into the, the meat of what it means. Think of it as spontaneous coordination through the self interested behaviors of independent parties. Now, what does that mean? That means when you allow individuals to figure out for themselves what to do, they will often figure out a way of coordinating. They don't need rules and procedures to tell them what to do. And if you think about it, that's the way that the free market economy works. We just give people an opportunity to, to collaborate and trade with whoever they like, and we use prices as a mechanism to figure out how best to make that trade work. What does this mean inside an organization? What does this mean as a management principle? I'm going to suggest a useful definition is that the, the emergencies, the guiding structures that stimulate individuals to coordinate their activities in a focused way, and of their own volition. Now that's a, that's a lot of words, but think of it, very simply, as, as a manager of others. We are creating a set of circumstances, a context, in which people will choose to figure out for themselves how best to work together. And really that is in some way is a very good definition of what managers do, rather than telling people exactly what to do, it create a setting which people figure out for themselves how to coordinate their activities. What are the benefits of this model? Well it's very responsive. Because we're allowing individuals close to the front line to make their own choices, which by definition what that means is that they're responding and adapting to what's happening in the business world. It's also very energizing if you're in charge of making your own choices. Then almost by definition again, it means that you're likely to, to feel a certain degree of ownership of the choices. And then finally it enables creativity. If you got somebody standing over you telling you exactly what to do, everything becomes very rigid. If on the other hand, we allow people to make their own choices, then they can bring their creativity to bear. So that's what emergence is and as you'll see it's exactly the opposite of coordination by bureaucracy. In order to kind of get our heads around what this really means in practice and how to, how to make sense of it in the business context, I'm going to give you a nice a nice metaphor. And the metaphor is from the world of traffic planning. Now, there was a very famous chap from Holland a few years ago. Well, he was, he was famous within his, within his world, I mean, probably not famous to the, to, to those of you who watch. His name was Hans Monderman, and he was a Dutch road traffic engineer. He died a few years ago, but he was, he was, he was quite influential in terms of designing some very, very well regarded experiments in the design of town planning systems back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Hans Monderman had this brain wave. He said to himself, the trouble with our road systems, particularly in a developed country like, like Holland, like the U.K., is that we've, we've created roads which are just too complicated, which have got too many signposts, too many, too many traffic lights, too many rules. And whenever there's an accident we create even more signposts, and even more rules to make sure that the accident doesn't happen again. And he said what we're doing is we're clogging up our systems. We're creating gridlock. What we should be doing is going in the exact opposite direction. So he said, to make our road systems safer, and more smooth, we need to make them more dangerous. We actually have to strip out an awful lot of the clutter that had been created by well-meaning planners. So, he managed to persuade a couple of towns and municipalities in Holland, and one of them was this town in, in northern Holland, called Dracton. He managed to persuade them to try his slightly theoretical ideas. He said to them, take your traditional town centers with particular ones which are really kind of gridlocked, and strip out all of the clutter. Strip out all the lights and all the markings, and create an open space. He called it Shared Space, whereby the pedestrians and the cyclists and the cars, or we're essentially co-existing with each other. We won't have a separate road and pavement. We'll just have everything paved in the same way. We won't have, lights will have a, a roundabout and we'll keep the number of markings to an absolute minimum. Now imagine you are a driver and you are approaching an intersection where suddenly nobody's telling you what to do. What, what's your response? It's pretty obvious what your response is. You basically take stock, you sort of slow down a little bit. You look around you. You look at what everyone else is doing and you figure out a way through that intersection, without hitting anybody. And that's what he predicted. And that is, of course, exactly what happened. They did very careful before and after studies, in this town, and in a few other munic-, municipalities. And they discovered that, not only was the traffic speed through these intersections, created. But actually, there were, there were no, there were no additional accidents. And indeed, the ambiance, the, kind of the overall kind of atmosphere in this area's improved as well. So that's one metaphor is that the town planning metaphor links, hopefully in a fairly clear way, to what we do inside big companies. Because if you think about it, the, the, the traffic lights and the markings on the road. Are the analogs of the direct counterparts to the, the planning systems and the budgeting systems when used in large companies. They're designed by well meaning senior people to create order and control. But the people who benefit from that control typically are the people at the top rather than the people who are actually doing the work. And so just as was able to. Strip out the lights and the markings on the road and to simplify things, the logic of immersion says, can big companies do the same? Can they strip out a lot of their traditional systems and processes to move away from a traditional bureaucratic coordination mechanism. Towards something that's more based on emergence. So emergence is a principle, it's been around for years. A lot of academics have used what's called complexity science as a way of making sense of the way that individuals in their system collaborate without, without any sort of higher order, rules, and it basically works pretty well. I'm going to show you on the caution, a little video actually. A chap called Steve Webber. He is a professor at Berkley, and he's going to be talking about this principle of emergence. You see, see this motion that we can make our actions visible to one another in a way that actually helps everybody to coordinate more effectively. And in fact, indeed to make the world a better place. So one of the exercises for this, for this module is going to be linked to that video.
