Life Is an Emergence, Not an Emergency!
For all our success as a species—or perhaps because of it—we’re ever more on red alert. Learning to see that life happens despite you, even without you, can be a surprise and a useful strategy.
Here’s one of the great ironies of modern life. You would think that given the luxuries bestowed upon us by the capitalist system—our big salaries, fancy cars, hi-tech gadgets and designer homes—that we’d be resting comfortably at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Saints or demigods, floating on clouds of our own making, thinking mostly about actualization—which act of service will bring us ultimate fulfilment. Instead, the system that holds us afloat relies on tech that keeps getting bigger, faster, better, and to keep up we find ourselves scrabbling from paycheck to paycheck, target to quarterly target, reporting cycle to reporting cycle, being churned ever faster, with shorter horizons and increasing consequence. One wrong move, you feel, and you’re back at the bottom.
No wonder, then, that most people, most of the time, are on red alert, one wrong comma away from an amygdala hijack. No wonder we treat everything like it’s an emergency.
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When facilitating corporate team performance workshops, I inevitably reference the amygdala hijack. I try to use humor to describe it. I say: “Your brain decides that if this bad thing happens, I’ll get into trouble, I’ll lose my job, my children will suffer, and I’ll die.” It raises the kind of laugh that tells me it touches a deep nerve. In fact, I once investigated this laughter response by interviewing people after some of those workshops and discovered that almost without exception—and even when they are not experiencing their work environment as chronically toxic, or job insecurity as particularly high—they had the thought process I had described, and more often than seemed reasonable. They shared that they often heard—and even used—phrases like, “It’s not the end of the world,” and, “Nobody will die,” when they or someone else overreacted.
People admitted that being in this state prevented them from taking actions that they believed would be beneficial
Importantly, those people also admitted that being in this state—I call it, rather prosaically, the “red zone”—prevented them from taking actions that they believed would be beneficial. For example, this fear of consequence prevented some from challenging a colleague in an open forum, and others from challenging their leader, even in a closed forum. For others, it led them to become unnecessarily angry when someone failed to meet a deadline, for fear that the missed deadline would impact their performance score and therefore bonus; or their reputation and therefore promotion. It led others to defend themselves aggressively when challenged, instead of taking the feedback constructively.
In nearly all instances, the interviewees concurred that their fear-based actions could be described as “defensive” or as “treating the situation as if it’s some kind of emergency”. They also agreed that their reactions were not optimal for their own mental wellbeing, nor for their own or their team’s overall performance. The late business theorist Chris Argyris—also a Yale and Harvard professor and recognized co-founder of the field of organization development (OD)—pointed to what he termed “defensive routines” and attributed them to “fear” and “threat”. Peter Senge elaborated on this idea and posited that these defensive routines are driven by the perceived potentially damaging career consequences of revealing an error in one’s thinking, or of not knowing something. So it’s not a rational response. It’s based on a perceived consequence and not an actual consequence. In fact, when individuals learn to share their thinking and assumptions, they find that, instead of being punished for doing so, they often build trust and get better results.
So, two conclusions flow from the above: the first is that we are caught in a systemic cycle of our own making in which our competition for progress keeps us trapped in emergency mode and we’re barely able to enjoy the fruits of our genius. I will address that in a separate missive. The second is / What this means is that much of what we fear—the emergencies we perceive to exist—are not always real (you’ll know if they are), and there is a different way to respond. (To be precise, there is a way to respond consciously, and not react.)
What would happen if you went to fetch a coffee and never came back?
Let’s address that second point. We’ll do it by going through the exercise that I give to people to help them exit emergency mode—the red zone—when they recognize they’re in it. It’s a presencing and grounding exercise taken from the practice of mindfulness, but please don’t discount it because you “know” mindfulness. I promise there’s a surprise on this journey.
I invite you to do it now. Stop reading for a moment and look at the room around you, and out the window if you can. Did you notice how still the objects are, how little attention they are paying to you and your thoughts, ideas, opinions, how little they care for what you want?
Now look at that same space again, this time as if you’re not in it. Stay where you are, but imagine you’ve gone to fetch a coffee and see if the walls or the windows or the furniture notice. Now imagine you didn’t return from making that cup of tea: you discovered you’d won the lottery and you just ran out the building and never came back. Imagine everybody joined you and nobody came back. What would happen to that room, to that building?
Here's the answer: something. Something would happen in that space. Dust would gather, batteries would run flat; things would rust, peel and decay; insects and rats would move in. Then some people might discover it, move in and clean it up—or have it demolished and build something in its place. The most important thing to notice is that it would happen without you. As life does. There’s a whole world out there that has a life of its own and which DOES NOT NEED YOU.
Things might turn out exactly as you’d hoped, despite you not being there
I put that in capital letters, because that’s the important point to get. To quote Carl Jung, “All modern people … assume that there is nothing … that they have not made up. We think we have invented everything physical—that nothing would be done if we did not do it; for that is our basic idea and it is an extraordinary assumption.”
Now think of a problem you’re facing in your life that you’re trying to control. A concern you have for your country or political party; an issue at work; a relationship problem. Now imagine that you weren’t going to be there to solve that problem the way you’d like. You’re going to be captured by aliens, and you’ll only return in five years’ time.
What do you suppose will happen in that time? That’s it. Something. Not nothing, which is what we more often assume. Things might turn out exactly as you’d hoped, despite you not being there. Perhaps, but let’s not tell you, precisely because you’re not there to interfere, and treat it like an emergency. Or they might turn out differently. Something unexpected, but better than anybody could have anticipated. Or it might be worse than anybody would have hoped, but with a silver lining—even if the silver lining is learning to accept.
The point is, something will happen in that space. And the stuff that happens, without us, despite us, is what we call emergence.
When you really get this, you see that life is always emerging; that you are a part of that emergence; that you do not sit outside of life’s events, as their omniscient creator.
We mostly learn the lesson in retrospect; we’re seldom present to it while it happens
We think we know what’s best for (almost) every situation and that it’s all up to us. Yet how many times have you heard someone say some version of, “I wouldn’t wish that situation on my worst enemy, but boy it was good for me. It made me who I am today.” That’s emergence. That’s life taking us on a journey that’s good for us, not the one that we insist must happen, not the one that we hold onto and treat like an emergency. If we were in a workshop setting, we’d share examples at this point. See if you can think of some from your own life and ask the people around you for examples from theirs.
Armed with those examples, notice how, almost without fail, we only learn the lesson in retrospect. Reluctantly. Ten years later. We’re seldom present to the lesson while it happens.
That’s the challenge. To become aware of emergence as it is happening. I equate this tiny point of awareness to the atom: it’s the smallest particle but contains all the energy of the universe. Similarly, and this is logic, not woo-woo, if it’s true that life is bigger than you, that things happen without you and despite you, then when you open yourself up to allow for that, all the power of the universe becomes available to you.
Knowing this is not enough. It’s the consistent practice that matters
Many of us say we “know” this. We’ve “done mindfulness” or we have it in our religion, through expressions like, “Let go and let God,”, or “Inshallah,” or “God willing.” But do we really live it? It’s like going to yoga and “knowing how to stretch”. That must mean you’re stretched for life, right? It’s the consistent practice that matters.
And then we think this is for the small, easy, inconsequential situations. I tell my clients that those are the situations to practice it, and to gather evidence of your experience to prove to yourself that it works, to calibrate your application of the principle. But if you really want to see the power of emergence, develop your practice to the point where you can apply it in the biggest, most consequential situations. I was working with a pharmaceutical client during the Covid-19 pandemic. They had a big issue with vaccines that had potentially massive political consequences for them. The executive leadership team chose to apply this principle. The situation resolved itself; it took a little longer than they would have liked, but they acknowledged afterwards that if they’d acted sooner or more aggressively, they could see how it might well have backfired and caused the exact consequences they had hoped to avoid.
Some of the world’s leading management and leadership gurus, being Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, have written about the advanced application of the emergence principle in a book called Presence. It’s worth checking out.
And finally, guess what: emergence goes on all the time, all around you, right here, right now. If you’re struggling to see it, well, it’s the very thing you’re fighting against. It’s what you call problems, the stuff that needs to be fixed, changed, directed according to your will, perfected. With technology, or whatever other means are available. It’s what John Lennon famously pointed to when he said, “Life is what happens while you’re making plans.” Or the Yiddish saying, “If you want God to laugh, tell him your plans.”
That doesn’t mean you don’t have plans or make effort. It just means that you’re not alone in the struggle to stay up there on your cloud.