Your organisation already
knows the answer.
Let it emerge.
Emergence is one of the fundamental forces of nature. It is how birds become a flock, neurons become a mind and strangers become a city: a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
Your organisation works the same way. Everyone holds a piece of the answer, but no one can see all of it alone. Bring your people together as a collective, and solutions emerge to your most complex problems, including the ones you didn't know you had.
- I spent my first morning waiting for a laptop— Jonas
- Nobody tells you who to ask for what— Amira
- Too many tools and no map of which one is for what— Lea
- I didn't meet my own team until week two— Tomás
- Unclear what 'good' looks like in month one— Noor
- Accounts and access took four days— Sam
- A buddy would have saved me hours— Kenji
- Docs are out of date by the time you read them— Ines
- Shadowing a real project helped more than any slide— Priya
- A checklist for the first week, please— Marco
An illustrative session. The organisation and names are fictional.
Your organisation is already a collective designer.
The people closest to the work know exactly what they need. Each of them holds part of the picture, but few can articulate the whole of it on their own. Ask them one at a time and you get a list of opinions. Ask them together and a pattern appears.
Emergence captures that knowledge in everyone's own words, synthesises it into a coherent result, and puts it on a shared screen. The room corrects it and builds on it before anyone leaves, so the outcome belongs to everyone who shaped it.
What emerges is something no one specified, but everyone recognises.
Thirty people contribute in five minutes. The quietest person in the room counts as much as the most senior one.
Duplicates merge, related ideas cluster and outliers stay visible. The AI finds the shape, and the group fills the gaps.
Every idea can be traced to the part of the result it shaped and to the person who gave it. People see their own words in the outcome.
From one question to a shared result
Every session follows the same four steps, whatever the topic. No accounts, no apps, no training: participants only need a phone or laptop.
- 01
Frame
Host · 2 minutesWrite the question and a little context. Choose the output (a mockup or a plan) and whether the group starts from problems or objectives.
- 02
Gather
Everyone · round 1People scan a QR code and type in their own words. Contributions stream onto the big screen and the AI groups them into themes as they arrive.
- 03
Sharpen
Everyone · round 2, optionally 3The AI shows a draft and asks one follow-up question, such as what is missing or what matters most. The group answers and the draft is revised.
- 04
Resolve
Host · end of sessionThe final result is shown on screen and shared as a link or PDF, with every idea credited to the person who gave it.
- Length
- 60–90 minutes
- Group size
- 8 to several hundred
- Format
- In person, remote or both
- You need
- A shared screen and a device each
Useful when something isn't working and the group first needs to agree on why.
Useful when the direction is open and the group first needs to agree on what success looks like.
Two kinds of output
Show people what they asked for, or agree on what to do next. The steps are the same; only the result differs.
The group's ideas become a clickable software mockup on the shared screen. Teams stop describing the tool they wish they had and start pointing at it. Try the example below.
Leave the room with a brief everyone recognises: problem, objectives, options and next steps, each backed by the words of the people who raised them.
New colleagues lose their first week to access, guesswork and isolation. Knowledge of who-does-what lives in people's heads.
- →Productive on day one — laptop, accounts, checklist ready
- →A named buddy before the first day
- →A real, small task shipped in week one
- □Pilot the buddy rota with the next three hires
- □One owner for the tool map, reviewed monthly
The 1991 Pong experiment
In 1991, at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Las Vegas, Loren Carpenter, one of the co-founders of Pixar, ran an experiment with an audience of around five thousand people.
Every seat had a paddle, green on one side and red on the other. A camera above the hall read the colours. The left half of the room controlled the left paddle of a Pong game on the big screen, and the right half controlled the right one. Green moved the paddle up, red moved it down.
Nobody explained what to do and nobody was in charge. Within moments the two halves of the room were playing a real game, each person simply reacting to what they saw on screen. Carpenter later described it as a kind of “subconscious consensus”. Later in the same session, the audience flew a flight simulator together in the same way.
No single person steered the paddle, yet the room as a whole played well. That is what emergence means: coordinated behaviour that comes from many individual decisions rather than from a plan.
A simplified simulation. Each dot is one person; most react to where the ball is, some don't. The share of green in each half sets the height of that side's paddle.
Why it worked, and how Emergence uses it
Everyone watched the same screen.
Contributions and the draft result appear on one shared screen.
Thousands of paddles moved in parallel, with no one in charge.
Everyone contributes at the same time, in their own words.
The room saw the effect of its choices straight away.
Each round reacts to the result of the one before.
For a broader introduction to the idea, watch What is Emergence? with Chris Fields.
Where it works best
Turn a day of discussion into a plan the whole group contributed to.
Find out what people need before anything gets built.
Hear where work gets stuck from the people who do it.
All-hands, communities and associations: collect hundreds of views in minutes.
Curious to try it with your group?
Emergence is in early access. If you have a group and a question you'd like to try it on, or just want to talk about the idea, get in touch.