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When the system is more than a sum of its parts (34)

Emergent properties

Children all over the world love playing with LEGO. There’s something magical about starting with a bunch of random blocks and assembling creations born from your imagination. Hand the same collection of pieces to someone else—child or adult—and you’ll likely see a completely different creation emerge. The endless possibilities have contributed to LEGO's timeless appeal across cultures.

In many ways, life itself isn’t so different from LEGO. Most things around us can be described as systems—defined sets of parts with specific interactions between them. Think about the air we breathe, the road networks connecting us to our destinations, or the human body: all these can be conceived as systems. Importantly, these systems exhibit behaviors and properties that their individual parts, when considered alone, do not.

This fascinating phenomenon is what systems engineers call emergence. It refers to the way complex properties or behaviors arise from the interactions of simpler components. Emergence is a relatively new area of study, and while we’ve identified patterns and examples, the underlying mechanisms remain elusive.

To illustrate how prevalent and impactful emergence is, here are three examples:

  1. The Shield Formation
    You’ve likely seen it in movies depicting Roman legionnaires or ancient Greek armies. The idea is simple: individually, a soldier with a shield is vulnerable. But when many soldiers interlock their shields and move as a unit, they create a nearly impenetrable formation. This collective strength far surpasses what each soldier could achieve alone.

  2. Thermodynamics
    At its core, a gas is just a collection of atoms moving randomly. Each atom has its own speed and direction, and if observed individually, the scene appears chaotic. But when you observe enough atoms together, collective properties like pressure and temperature emerge. These are new, system-level properties that don’t exist at the level of individual atoms.

  3. Economic Recessions
    Each participant in a market—whether vendor or buyer—makes individual decisions to thrive. But if a significant portion of participants develops negative expectations about the economy, their collective behavior can trigger a recession. This, in turn, impacts even those who were previously successful, creating a feedback loop of declining economic activity.

Understanding emergence offers a powerful lens through which we can design better systems and navigate the world. Whether it’s crafting more resilient organizations, developing sustainable ecosystems, or building innovative technologies, recognizing how new properties arise from interactions can help us make smarter choices. Just as with LEGO, where a handful of pieces can create infinite designs, the power of emergence lies in its ability to transform the simple into the extraordinary.


 

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