Emergence is when something new takes shape from many small actions connecting together. It's not planned from the top down. It grows from the ground up. A few people start checking on each other during heat waves and gradually it becomes a town-wide support network. Someone finds a better way to organise emergency supplies, others adopt it and soon it's common practice.
Working with emergence means paying attention to these small starts and helping the promising ones grow. Not every new idea will take off, but the ones that meet a real need often do.
The practice starts with noticing what's happening at the edges: new ways people are solving problems, unexpected connections forming, small innovations catching on. When someone tries something that seems to be working, others can learn from it and adapt it to their situation.
Supporting emergence is less about designing solutions and more about tending conditions: building trust, keeping communication flowing, making connections. When something gains traction, help it along. When it's not working, learn quickly and adjust.
Capturing what sparked a successful approach helps other communities adapt it to their context. Over time, noticing and supporting these patterns becomes second nature.
Communities stay flexible and responsive when you work with emergence rather than trying to plan everything in advance. New solutions surface as conditions change.
Something to chew on:
What small pattern in your community might be signalling a bigger shift worth supporting?
Resilience Bites offers weekly insights from the Australian Resilience Centre, drawn from decades of work alongside communities across Australia and internationally. Each Bite explores an aspect of resilience and closes with a reflective question to chew on.
Across the series we'll explore themes that shape resilience in practice, including place, patterns, networks, leadership, learning, feedbacks, thresholds and the deeper work of change.
This series is for people working in communities, landscapes, systems and change. It will help you learn key resilience concepts, apply them in practice and build our collective capacity to create resilient futures.
To learn more about the Australian Resilience Centre and explore our work and services, please visit https://www.ausresilience.com.au/
To read published Bites, please visit https://resiliencebites.ausresilience.com.au/
