Emergence

There is no Amazon Prime for change. No tracking number. No estimated delivery date.

Change arrives quietly, like fog rolling over a coastline or new shoots breaking through ash after a fire. It doesn’t announce itself. It emerges.

In this episode, Mary Schaub explores emergence as one of the most fundamental patterns shaping human experience across art, nature, relationships, organizations, and society. From pointillist painting and jazz improvisation to career pivots, addiction recovery, corporate growth, and artificial intelligence, emergence reveals why transformation is both inevitable and profoundly uncomfortable.

Drawing on Taoism, systems thinking, leadership experience, and lived personal reflection, this episode examines why our instinct to control change so often backfires—and what capacities help us navigate uncertainty with more grace, curiosity, and resilience.

This is not an episode about optimism.

It’s about learning how to stay present while the story is still unfolding.

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

Transcript

Mary Schaub (00:00)

There's no Amazon Prime for change. No tracking number, no estimated delivery date, no reassuring ping on your phone telling you it's arrived. Change seeps in, like fog rolling over a coastline, diffuse, barely noticeable, and then suddenly you can't see three feet in front of you. Picture the floor of a forest after a fire, ash everywhere.

silence. Then, in these weird, irregular pockets, completely unpredictable, new shoots appear. There's no master plan, no orderly progression, just life insisting itself back into existence. That's emergence. And once you learn to see it, you realize it's the fundamental pattern underlying almost everything that actually matters in human experience.

So what is emergence?

It's the moment when scattered elements, dots, music notes, movements, decisions, suddenly cohere into something recognizable, something new.

In visual art, there's a technique called pointillism. George Seurat and Paul Signac developed it in 1886. They'd placed thousands of tiny dots of pure color on canvas. Up close, it looks like chaos, just disconnected specks. But step back, and those dots resolve into luminous scenes. Sunday Afternoons by the River.

light itself, somehow captured in discrete points. The viewer's eye does the mixing. The painting emerges in the space between the canvas and your perception.

In music, if you've ever watched jazz musicians or jam bands like the Grateful Dead or Phish Improvise, you've witnessed emergence in real time. It starts with what sounds like randomness. Someone plays a note.

Another musician responds. A drummer picks up a rhythm. And gradually, and this is the key, gradually, not suddenly, patterns form. Themes develop. Before you know it, there's a coherent piece of music that didn't exist 30 seconds earlier. Nobody planned it. Nobody designed it. It emerged from interaction, from people paying attention and responding to each other in the present moment.

In nature, emergence is everywhere. Hundreds of birds, each following simple local rules. Stay close to your neighbors, keep up, avoid collision. They become synchronized, flowing sculptures in the sky. No bird is directing the flock. The pattern emerges from countless individual decisions.

Or think about an ant colony. Each ant is relatively simple.

following basic protocols. But collectively, they create elaborate structures, maintain complex supply chains, even wage wars and practice agriculture. The colony's intelligence emerges from millions of simple interactions. No ant understands the bigger picture. Yet, the bigger picture exists.

This is what fascinates me about emergence. It appears across every domain of human experience. But, and here's the paradox, it's fundamentally unpredictable. After a forest fire, we know new growth will come. But where? When? What form will it take? We can't say. The pattern is real, but its specific manifestation remains uncertain until it appears.

And we humans, we find this profoundly uncomfortable. I know I do.

We are prediction machines. Our brains evolve to detect patterns, anticipate threats, plan for the future. Uncertainty triggers our threat detection systems. It activates the same neural networks associated with physical pain. So when change arrives without warning, without clear timelines or guaranteed outcomes, we suffer.

Here's a scenario you might recognize. Your boss calls you into a meeting. The company's been acquired by a competitor. What's your immediate internal response? If you're like most people, it's, am I gonna be fired? And the honest answer, nine times out of 10, is we don't know yet. This isn't comforting. It's not what you're looking to hear. You want certainty.

You want to know if you should update your resume or celebrate a promotion. Instead, you're told to wait while things emerge.

Intellectually, you might understand that this acquisition could lead to opportunities you never imagined. Maybe you'll get promoted into a role that didn't exist before. Or maybe you'll be laid off. Or maybe you'll end up finding work that's actually more aligned with who you really are. Or...

Maybe all these things are going to happen.

but you can't know, and that ambiguity feels dangerous.

There's an ancient Taoist parable that addresses this beautifully. It's called The Maybe Story.

The farmer's horse runs away. His neighbors say, what terrible luck. The farmer replies, maybe. The next day the horse returns, bringing two wild horses with him. The neighbors say, what amazing luck. The farmer says, maybe. The son tries to tame one of the wild horses and breaks his leg. The neighbors, such bad luck. The farmer.

Maybe. Then soldiers arrive to draft all the young men for war, but the son's broken leg disqualifies him. And the neighbors celebrate such good luck. And the farmer, once again, maybe.

The point isn't that the farmer lacks emotion or doesn't care what happens. The point is that he understands something fundamental. Events don't reveal their meaning at the moment they occur. Judgment is premature because the story is still unfolding. What looks like disaster today might be the catalyst for something extraordinary tomorrow. What seems like good fortune might contain the seeds of future difficulty. This isn't fatalism.

It's recognizing that we exist within complex dynamic systems where causality operates in ways we can't fully predict or control. All things have the potential to be both positive and negative. The context and our personal judgments determine how we feel about them at any given moment. And yet we spend enormous energy trying to control the uncontrollable.

We demand certainty from an uncertain universe. We create elaborate plans and then suffer when reality refuses to follow our script.

The irony is that everything, everything is constantly emerging. Trying to stop emergence is like trying to stop the tide. It's not just futile, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the universe actually works.

Okay, now I need to pause and be honest with you. This tension between control and emergence isn't theoretical for me, it's personal. I built a career on structure.

on seeing patterns and chaos and creating order. As a transformation and operations executive, my job was to design operating models, frameworks meant to bring efficiency, clarity, and predictability to complex systems. When I close my eyes, I see systems diagrams. When I walk into a store, my brain automatically starts analyzing flow, staffing, and layout. This isn't metaphorical.

That's how I experience the world. So when I talk about befriending emergence, I'm not speaking as someone naturally flexible or go with the flow. I'm speaking as someone who's had to work, sometimes painfully, to loosen my grip on control. Because here's what I've learned. If you design a transformation strategy but stay rigid about how it unfolds, it will fail.

The most brilliant strategy becomes useless if you can't adapt to what emerges during implementation. There's no formula for this, despite what LinkedIn might suggest. You can't control your way into adaptation, and you certainly can't force it upon others.

The first version of this show, Shobukai Shift, taught me a lot.

something felt off. incomplete. Then came the first real signal. I was tired. No, I was exhausted. It wasn't just the workload. It was that the finished product wasn't giving energy back.

something stalled and that really frustrated me. I mean, I had a full year planned, detailed schedules, clear milestones, but when I sat down to work, I couldn't. I felt angry, disappointed, guilty, like this was a failure of discipline somehow. So I did the hardest thing for someone like me. I paused, I rested, and I listened.

And slowly, not all at once, clarity emerged. Not through more planning, not through tighter structure, through the opposite, through space, through curiosity, through trusting that if I paid attention, the next iteration would reveal itself. That's how fractals of change came into being. Not through perfect strategy, but by allowing the pattern to emerge.

In Taoism, this is called wu wei, action without force. It doesn't mean passivity. It means aligning with the natural unfolding of things instead of imposing your will on reality. It means learning to work with emergence rather than against it. And it's going to keep evolving. How could it not? This experience reminded me that we can't force this process.

It's often uncomfortable. Maybe sometimes it's painful. But if you can stay present through the doubt and disorientation, you do come through the other side. And when you look back, you often see the gift that was hidden in the process.

Individual emergence is hard enough, but add another person and the system changes. When one element shifts, the whole relationship reorganizes, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally. I work with a client, let's call him Barry. He's a finance executive in his mid-40s. Two years ago, he went through a divorce, difficult, but mutual.

Afterward, he began spending a lot of time with his college best friend Arnie, who was single, available, and free in ways most of Barry's married friends weren't. They fell into a familiar rhythm. Dinner at the bar, late nights, clubs, meeting women. At first, Barry described Arnie as the perfect wingman. After the divorce, his confidence was low. The social activity, the attention,

even when it felt transactional, helped him feel visible again. For a while it worked. But over time, Barry started to notice the cost. Five or six drinks a night, missed workouts, spending money he didn't want to spend, gaining weight, showing up to work hungover, reading less, moving less. The lifestyle that helped him survive the immediate aftermath of divorce was now working against him.

Something can be adaptive and still be temporary because change doesn't occur like a flash of lightning. It's more like a series of sunrises and sunsets. Barry originally hired me to help him step into a more senior role, but within two sessions, it was clear that he needed something deeper. Together, we talked about life phases and how relationships often serve different functions in different seasons.

Barry and Arnie's friendship thrived in college, fraternity life, going out, having fun. During Barry's marriage, they barely saw each other. And after the divorce, Barry unconsciously recreated that earlier dynamic. He went backward to regain steady ground. That backward movement served a purpose, but the point wasn't to fight his new reality or return to an old version of himself.

The process was for him to evolve into something new.

As Barry healed and gained confidence, he felt an internal pull towards something different. He couldn't fully articulate it, but he knew what no longer fit. Late nights, transactional dating, waking up exhausted and foggy. Growth often starts this way, not with clarity, but with resistance. We didn't build an elaborate plan, just some basic boundaries. No drinking on weeknights, non-negotiable morning gym sessions,

a realistic budget. Then came the hardest part, how to talk to Arnie. Barry invited him to join him at the gym. And at first, Arnie came. They worked out, grabbed smoothies afterwards, and went on with their day. It felt like a healthier version of their bond. But gradually, Arnie stopped showing up. He was tired, maybe tomorrow. And eventually, he stopped coming altogether. As Barry spent more time at the gym,

He met new people. He joined an outdoor running group. He formed friendships aligned with who he was becoming, not who he had been. Barry still cared deeply about Arnie, but he cared about himself more.

Here's the point. When one person changes within a relationship system, the entire system reorganizes. This is why addiction recovery programs emphasize changing your social environment. Not because your old friends are bad people, but because relationship patterns are designed to preserve the system as it is. When you change, the system has only two options. It can evolve or it can dissolve.

There's no option where you transform and everything else stays the same. You can't change in isolation. What shifts within you will ripple through every relationship you're part of.

Okay, now scale this up to the organizational level and the dynamics become even more complex. Early in my career, I worked at Tiffany and Company's corporate office. Even then it was large, established, with significant structure. The kind where you needed multiple approvals to order pizza for your team. I'm not criticizing this, structure isn't inherently bad. As I've said, I've built a career on it.

For a company with tens of thousands of employees, multiple locations, regulatory requirements, you need structure. It keeps things from descending into chaos. I left that culture and joined Oliver Wyman, a strategy consulting firm. At the time, it was larger than a startup, but still relatively small compared to competitors like McKinsey or BCG. And the culture could not have been any more different from Tiffany's 

a flat hierarchy and fast decision-making. One morning, I was standing in the kitchen trying to figure out how to make coffee from the expensive espresso machine I was unfamiliar with. I struck up with what I thought was just a casual conversation with a managing partner. His name was Matthew Cunningham, he'd go on to become the firm's chief financial officer. I had joined the firm to help them turn around an enterprise CRM strategy.

I shared with Matthew some thoughts on what I was developing. On the spot, right there in the kitchen, he suggested I tour all the European offices to talk with the regional partners about my plan. And within a week, I was on a plane. I'll be honest with you, it was only the second time I had traveled to Europe. I was shocked and excited. It was so intoxicating to me. The speed, the trust, the sense that...

Good ideas could move immediately from conversation to implementation without getting trapped in bureaucratic approval processes. Oliver Wyman had been founded by partners who'd left another firm that had, in their view, gotten too big and slow. Their explicit vision was to maintain the agility and entrepreneurial energy of a smaller firm, even as they grew. But here's the thing about growth. It changes everything, whether you intend it to or not.

The kind of informal kitchen conversation decision making that worked brilliantly at 2,000 people becomes genuinely problematic at 7,000. Not because anyone got lazy or bureaucratic, but because scale creates complexity. At 2,000 people, if someone makes a decision that conflicts with something happening in another office, you can probably sort it out with a call or an email. At 7,000 people, those conflicts become expensive, even risky.

So gradually, and again, this is emergence, structure evolves. Not because the original vision changed, not because anyone decided to quote, become corporate, but because the organizational reality shifted. Sure, some of that original magic gets lost, but other capabilities, things you couldn't do at 2,000 people become possible. This isn't failure, it's emergence.

And great leaders understand this. They know how to work with emergence skillfully

All right, let's go up one more level to see emergence operating at a societal scale. Perfect example, artificial intelligence. Over the last three years, articles about AI have increased 57%. It's impossible to avoid discussions about AI's impact on employment, relationships, education, healthcare, warfare, art, essentially every domain of human activity. Most experts agree AI will fundamentally reshape society.

But how exactly? What will the second and third order effects be? Which jobs will disappear? Which will transform? Which will emerge that don't even exist yet? Nobody knows. Not really. We can make educated guesses, but we're essentially watching emergence happen in real time. And predictably, this uncertainty generates tremendous anxiety. We're being told that everything we know is changing.

but we can't be given assurance that we'll be better off. Some people will benefit enormously, others will be displaced. Most of us will experience both at different moments and different ways. This is exactly like your boss telling you the company's been acquired. Same dynamic, different scale.

I don't have a definitive answer to the AI question. The only certainty is change itself. Whether that change is ultimately good or bad depends on factors we can't fully predict or control. What I can tell you is this, as the Borg said, resistance is futile. Not because AI is inevitable, though it probably is, but because emergence is inevitable

If emergence is inevitable, and it is, then the question becomes, how do we develop the capacities needed to work with it rather than against it? I offer three practices which you might find useful. These aren't techniques to master emergence, they're ways to develop a different relationship with it.

the first practice is attunement. Attunement is the foundational practice underlying everything else.

It's the capacity to pay attention both to what's happening around you and within you. This sounds simple. It is not. Most of us spend the majority of our time in a fragmented attentional state. We're scrolling through our phones while half listening to a conversation, while thinking about something that happened yesterday, while worrying about something that might happen tomorrow. We're rarely fully present to the moment we're actually in.

And that fragmentation comes at enormous cost.

If you can't pay attention to what's actually happening, you can't detect the early signals of emerging change. You miss the subtle shifts in yourself and others in the systems you're part of until they've already solidified into crisis. Attunement means developing the capacity to notice, to observe without immediately judging or reacting, to sense the quality of your own internal state and to read the room.

This is a trainable skill. It's also incredibly difficult in our current reality where attention has been weaponized and commodified. And if you're an executive, a leader, someone responsible for guiding others through change, this skill is not optional. You cannot lead people through uncertainty if you can't first sense what's actually happening yourself.

My good friend, Christian Madsberg, wrote a fantastic book on this called, Look, How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World. It's great. You should read it. I'll put a link in the show notes.

The second practice is pattern recognition. Human intelligence fundamentally comes down to pattern recognition, the ability to detect structure in what appears chaotic. Our brains are constantly searching for patterns because patterns allow us to anticipate what comes next. This is what kept our ancestors alive. The ones who heard the predator rustling in the grass survived at higher rates than those who didn't.

But pattern recognition in complex systems requires something beyond simple stimulus response. It requires the ability to hold multiple timescales simultaneously, to see the immediate situation while also perceiving long-term trajectories. Let me give you an example. If you're a leader and someone on your team starts missing deadlines, that's a data point. If they also start withdrawing from team meetings, that's another.

If their work quality drops, that's a third. You could respond to each event individually, or you could recognize a pattern. Something's wrong. Maybe it's burnout, maybe it's a personal crisis, maybe they're job hunting. The pattern gives you information that the individual events don't. And that information allows you to intervene skillfully, to have a conversation, to offer support, to adjust workload.

before the situation becomes a crisis. Pattern recognition in the context of emergence means learning to see change while it's still forming, not after it's already happened, while it's happening. This is how you adapt quickly rather than reactively. This is how you move with change rather than being surprised or overwhelmed by it.

The third practice is experimentation. Developing comfort with experimentation, trying things without knowing how they'll turn out. This is what I did with season one of the show. Most of us have been trained to plan extensively before acting, to have the answers all figured out so we can minimize risk. But when you're working with emergence, perfect planning is impossible. You can't plan for what you can't predict.

which means you need to develop a different relationship with action. You need to be willing to try things, gather information, adjust based on what you learn, and try again. You agile practitioners know exactly what I'm talking about. This is fundamentally a practice of humility. You're acknowledging that you don't have all the answers. You're accepting that learning requires being willing to be wrong.

Try it. Start small. If you're someone who always plans everything, like me, reads the menu before going to a restaurant, maps out every detail of a trip, practice improvising in low-stakes situations. Go to a new restaurant without looking at the menu first. Walk in. What do you smell? What are other people eating? What jumps out at you? Try something you've never had before. Okay, this may sound trivial, but you're training a couple

You're learning to trust yourself in situations where you don't have all the information. You're learning that you can handle not knowing exactly what will happen. Once you've tried it, scale it up. Try it with a small home project. Instead of planning every detail, identify your core objective and start. See what emerges. Adjust based on what you learn. You're not being reckless. You're developing

with the reality that emergence is how change actually works. You're training yourself to work with it rather than against it. I hope these practices might help you to dance more gracefully with emergence because the uncomfortable truth is this. We just can't know how things are gonna turn out. Not really. The story is still unfolding. Judgment is always premature. But what we can do is develop the capacity

to sustain ourselves through not knowing, to stay curious, to remain adaptable, to trust that we have the resources to navigate whatever emerges.

Emergence teaches us that transformation doesn't announce itself with fanfare. It seeps in. It forms gradually from countless small movements and decisions. Our job isn't to control this process. It's to develop the capacities needed to work with it skillfully, to pay attention to what's actually happening rather than what we wish were happening, to recognize patterns, to see the shape of change while it's still forming.

and to experiment, to try things, to learn, adjust, and to try again.

This isn't optimism. It's something deeper, a fundamental acceptance of the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Everything we've built, everything we are, everything we might become, it's all emerging, constantly, continuously. The question isn't whether emergence happens. It's how we can dance joyfully with it.

I'm Mary Schaub. This is Fractals of Change, wishing you curiosity, presence, and flow.