Guest: Peggy Holman Date: December 21, 2011
Just short of a year ago I interviewed Peggy Holman about her book, Engaging Emergence. I'd been looking forward to the conversation because the ideas in her book are very exciting.
Rob: Welcome to the Rob
Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township,
reaching metro Philly and south Jersey. It's sponsored by OpEdnews.com and you
can get podcast recordings of the radio show at iTunes, looking for Rob Kall,
K-a-l-l or go to OpEdnews.com/podcasts.
My guest tonight is Peggy Holman. She's the author of Engaging Emergence, Turning Upheaval into
Opportunity. She's the founder of
Open Circle Company, and co-founder of Journalism That Matters, and she's the
co-author of The Change Handbook. Wow. Welcome to the show, Peggy.
Peggy: Thank
you Rob. It's great to be here.
Rob: I got to say when I first saw this book, I really got
excited. It takes an approach to a phenomenon that I think a lot of people
don't ever think of, and you've given so much really cool, smart thoughts to
this. How did you ever get here? How did you get to this book?
Peggy: Well, it was a bit of a journey. I
actually used to work in Information Technologies, and the company I was
working for started a total quality effort, and we had this project on the
rocks, and the company had, in this total quality movement, we had the expert
who had been hired in, organize this meeting that brought together, at that
time, a new term for me: "all of the stake holders." And in the process of
doing that, over the course of two hours, about thirty [30] people came to a
collective decision about where to go with this project. And, I'd never seen a
professionally facilitated meeting before, and I didn't know that something
like that was possible, and I got hooked. And in the process of learning about
ways of bringing large groups of people together and have useful results come
out, I ran into these group practices that let you bring not tens or dozens,
but hundreds [100s] or even thousands [1000s] of people together around
complex, important issues; and indeed where there's conflict or people with
very different, diverse prospective perspective, that actually becomes the
source of creativity and generativity in meetings. And early on, as I started
exploring these different practices (and this is back in the mid 90s) I saw
something in a meeting using a process called "Open Space Technology" that I'd
never seen before, which was, that the needs of individuals and the needs of
the whole, could both be served. And I always thought that one or the other had
to sacrifice. And what I now know is, I would call that one of the signs that
emergence order arising out of chaos has taken place--and that led me--that
hooked me, because I figured if it's possible for both individual needs and
collective needs to get met, I wanted to know more about that. And it really
sent me on a journey, both to learn about practices and processes that enable
that to happen, and what engaging emergence is about, which is, "What are the
fundamental dynamics that enable that to happen?" and "How do we work with them
consciously so that we can do more of it, and more of us can do it?"
Rob: Why
don't you just give us a definition of emergence, engaging emergence. What's
that mean?
Peggy: Sure. It's a funny word, because I
think it has both a very precise scientific meaning, and its part of our
everyday language. I mean, we talk about things emerging all the time. And a
simple definition of it is: the notion of order arising out of chaos. And as
you talk about the notion of "bottom up," that's really fairly fundamental to
the way emergence happens.
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