Facilitating Emergent Change in a Healthcare Setting

Abstract

During my doctoral research, I identified new ways of thinking about complexity in organizations. This involved embracing the capacity of complex systems to find their own form of order and coherence, often referred to as self-organization, and then asking the question, “What can organizational leaders do to create the systems and structures that would facilitate emergent change?” Emergent change comes from within and through the active members of a system and not according to some external prompting or design. This results in the sort of change capacity that enables an organization to be agile and resilient through a high level of employee engagement. The question was answered by identifying and validating organizational-specific factors that facilitate emergent change.