If the term Emergence gives you a discomforting itch either because you don’t understand it, don’t value it, can’t work with it, or it sounds too woo woo for you, I have a fun and light suggestion that may bring your mental lightbulbs to life. Watch the animated film: Penguins of Madagascar. I’m not joking. You can watch it with your kids over the weekend, have fun, and no one will suspect you’re learning or working.
Left: The Planning Competition: Skipper the Penguin’s Plan. Right: Classified the Wolf’s Plan. (movie shots)
On the surface, it’s a story about an technologically equipped team called North Wind (NW), “saving” some penguins risking extinction. Turns out, the penguins may not need saving after all; they are not as helpless as North Wind (NW) assumed.
But it is also the story of two leaders in competition (Skipper the Penguin and Classified-NW, the Wolf) who fight to be recognized, respected, and “right” above and beyond the other within the pretext of saving the helpless. Sound familiar?
Classified is the leader of his very well-equipped, well-organized team. They look professional, impeccable, and their plans are thought-out down to the very last detail. It’s very easy to assume they are the most competent, the most prepared, the most professional.
Skipper the Penguin is instead, a leader of a team of four penguins who work with emergence. Skipper often polls his team to assess moments of crisis. When there isn’t enough time to do so, he gives directions and acts from a great deal of intuition, as do his team members. They make moment-to-moment decisions.
Both Skipper and Classified are respected within their small team. But once the two teams have same target, there’s trouble. Each leader wants to be in charge and prove their way is the only right way and the result is chaos. The conflict that ensues is one we’ve all seen. One at a time, they each fail and their teams pay the price.
The Chaordic Path Theoretical Framework: An Illustration
When it comes to flying a plane, Skipper’s emergence tactics are not the best choice. Classified’s impeccable plan on the other hand, falls apart when unpredictably, the whole team gets trapped by eight octopi.
The story exemplifies the Chaordic Path, the creative path that emerges between chaos and order. The term Chaordic was coined by Dee Hock. In organizations, this means being able to create space for the new solutions that come about–emerge, from the combination of Chaos AND Order–combined.
I don’t want to spoil the movie for you. All I’ll say is that in the “glorious future” of our animal families, we gain an appreciation of the bravery that Emergence requires. From the competition between the two leaders, a new leader is born, who combines bravery, creativity, and analytical thinking.
I won’t say anything else for now…..but feel free to post your comments below if you have any other questions or other parallels that you notice in this movie with leadership practices and group dynamics!