Emergence is a big concept here at $O$, so I’d like to talk a little about what it means. Emergence is a complex subject, but I’ll do my best to try to make it simple, and to the handful of people who get that joke, I hope you appreciate it.

Our entire lives are ruled by systems. There’s the heating and cooling systems that run our house, the political and cultural systems that determine how we live our lives, even the physical systems that determine how things move. Some of these systems are simple. Some of them, not so much. Emergence is something that comes out of some of the more complicated systems we encounter.

To put it simply, emergence is when order spontaneously appears in a system without any of the individual parts working to create it. And yes, that is the simple version. It’s easier to understand if we look at it by example, and the best example I know of are traffic jams. 

Let’s take the view of an alien in orbit, looking down at the highway system. At this level, we don’t see drivers, we just see little dots moving over thousands of miles of roads strung together. Most of the time, they are distributed pretty evenly, if a bit randomly. All the little dots just zipping along, going to wherever they are going, each one doing their own thing. But every so often, all the dots just line up together. They form these miles long strings that can last for hours, just out of the blue. And just as mysteriously as these lines appear, they disappear. Order appears spontaneously out of an otherwise random system, with no apparent cause and disappearing just as randomly. 

Now we understand what causes traffic jams. Accidents, speed traps, heavy traffic, as drivers we understand why they happen. To us, there’s no mystery in it. But haven’t you ever hit a traffic jam, inched your way forward for what seems like forever and then suddenly you hit a point that looks no different than any other point on the road except suddenly traffic goes from a dead stop to full speed. Doesn’t it make you wonder? Why that spot? Did they already clear the accident? Was it something left over from hours ago? Who knows?

Back to emergence. When we look at traffic jams from a systems perspective, here’s what we get. Each individual driver is a part of the system. Each person is making their own decision. Now, only a lunatic wants to intentionally cause a traffic jam, so for this example we can assume that all traffic jams are accidental. Therefore, no one person actively makes the traffic jam happen. Instead, it is the collective individual actions of multiple drivers, each with little or no knowledge of any other driver’s actions that cause it to happen. Each individual part carrying out its own agenda, with no intention to create a line of cars sometimes will create a line of cars. The order (cars lining up one behind the other for miles) emerges from the system. 

Emergence is often associated with the phrase that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is one of our driving principles here at $O$. That the plans we make, the tech we build, the research we do, the programs we put into place, while each one will be individually effective, they will also have a combined impact that is much greater than any one could be on its own. We factor the idea of emergence into everything we can. Because it lets us do more with less, and there is so much to do.