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Peggy Holman: Engaging Emergence; Moving Towards Order From Chaos-- Interview Transcript

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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.

Thanks to  Don Caldarazzo for help editing the transcript.  
Link to the audio podcast.

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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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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