“For those who feel battered by change and chaos, Peggy Holman’s book is a tonic. The intelligent, optimistic and caring voice with which she facilitates complex, even contentious groups in transition permeates the pages. Engaging Emergence is at once pragmatic and palliative — good for the mind and heart.”
—Jill Geisler, Group Leader, Leadership and Management Programs, The Poynter Institute
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“Our times require new levels of understanding. Courageous, creative, collaborative — read emergent — processes are key to getting there. Peggy Holman’s new book helps us appreciate why such process are needed, how they work, and what it takes to get them to happen.”
—Charles Johnston, MD, author of The Creative Imperative and Hope and the Future
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“Peggy Holman offers practical and intelligent insight into the power, gift and practice of working with emergence. Her dedication and generosity in harvesting hers and other practitioners’ experience is from the heart. Our practice of emergence is of the essence for us as a species and for the planet we live on.”
—Toke Paludan Moeller, cofounder and CEO, InterChange, and cofounder and practitioner of the Art of Hosting and the Flow Game
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“In Engaging Emergence Peggy Holman does the best job yet of showing us how managers and change agents can use the insights of complexity theory for planned, transformational change. Highly readable and practical, Holman provides useful, concrete illustrations that make it easy to understand a difficult topic.”
—Gervase Bushe, Professor of Leadership and Organization Development, Segal Graduate School of Business, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and author of Clear Leadership
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“Emergence and its associated chaos are happening at an accelerating pace. Ms. Holman offers practical perspectives for working with emergence creatively as a source of opportunity.”
—James B. Shaffer, Chief Operating Officer and Dean, School of Business, University of Southern Maine
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Engaging Emergence gives us hope that we can step beyond the irrelevant entrainment of the past, bring forward what is useful and effectively operate into the uncertain and unknown future. By giving language to the practice of engaging emergence, Peggy Holman lifts us beyond theory to a place of useful practice.”
—Nancy White, author of Digital Habitats
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“Engaging Emergence is a crucial guide for navigating transitional moments in social systems — from group upsets and business challenges to global financial meltdowns. Holman brilliantly applies a 14-billion-year historical perspective in ways that give us the eyes to see opportunity amid chaos, the heart to trust the process, and the mental toolkit to effectively nurture evolutionary breakthroughs.”
—Connie Barlow, author of Evolution Extended
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“This book is of service to change agents attempting to bring about complex transformative change – the type of change needed to reinvent our world and the major task of humanity at this moment in time. Thank you for stepping up to the challenge of grounding this elusive concept into an actual change strategy.”
—David Gershon, president, Empowerment Institute and author of Social Change 2.0
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“A fantastic invitation to continually re-frame perceptions and practical responses to our chaotic, confusing, self-organizing world! Peggy has integrated and synthesized much of our emerging world into a work of art that is simple yet comprehensive and inclusive. Her work is way beyond established approaches for decision-making and systems re-creation.”
—Gail West, Director, Institute of Cultural Affairs, Taiwan
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“Peggy’s book is a delightful combination of deep conceptual insights, engaging stories, practical tools and witty diagrams. Drawing on her diverse experience, Peggy has woven an original tapestry that engages and informs. In a disruptive world that needs new possibilities yesterday, this book is a beacon of light.”
—Arun Wakhlu, Executive Chairman, Pragati Leadership Institute, Pune, India
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“Engaging Emergence proposes a fascinating and potent approach for engaging whole systems to address change and uncertainty. I already feel excitement for applying this framework to my next consulting endeavor.”
—Pablo Restrepo, President, Tandem Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and professor on negotiation for Universidad de los Andes, Colombia and McGill University, Canada
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“To change or not to change, that is not the question! In a complex and fast paced world the only question is how to change creatively and successfully. Peggy Holman unlocks this complex challenge with a set of fundamental principles and practices. Follow them and your organization will flourish. Ignore them and it will eventually shrivel.”
— Henri Lipmanowicz, Board Chair, Plexus Institute and former President, Merck
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“This book is simply brilliant. Peggy has done us all a great service—laying out clearly and effectively how to navigate through the chaos of our times into the emergent order that is the transformation we all seek and must deliver.“
—Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money and cofounder of The Pachamama Alliance
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“Not since The Fifth Discipline have I found a book on organizational learning that combines such powerful insights and useful practices.”
—Tracy Robinson, Executive Director, Seattle Center Foundation
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“Holman’s work makes the compelling case that helping employees and stakeholders find a sense of ownership and optimism about the changes that engulf them is a key to successful transformations in any company or group. This book should be in the library of every manager who would like to help their employees and stakeholders develop better mechanisms for coping with, and being optimistic about, change.”
—Chris Peck, Executive Editor, Memphis Commercial Appeal
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“Peggy Holman has tapped into a powerful evolutionary truth we can use today in our lives, our work, our world: Disturbance tells us something new needs to surface. The more creatively we engage with disturbance, the more likely it will gift us its fruits. This book tells us how to garden disturbances to yield breakthroughs.”
—Tom Atlee, Founder, Co-Intelligence Institute
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“Holman steps onto the shaky ground of the 21century, finds meaning, and creates stability from our uncertainty. She builds our faith that coherence is out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered. Prepare to leap!”
—Geoff Bellman, Consultant and Co-Author of Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results
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“Thank you, Peggy, for disturbing us with this book. It is both provocative and confirming— providing a deeper understanding of today’s difficult problems and pointing to simple ways of enabling people to discover their own life-giving solutions.”
—Sandra Janoff, Co-Director, Future Search Network
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“Peggy Holman is a theorist at the evolving edge of thought and application. She puts clear language to the processes emerging around us in the field of change. We are grateful for her wide-ranging experience, networking, and wisdom.”
—Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea, authors of The Circle Way
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” Holman takes us on a journey into the heart of creativity at work. Her stories, illustrations and key concepts provide guidance about how to invite, flow with, facilitate, and benefit from emergent processes. Read it and enjoy what emerges!”
—Diana Whitney, PhD, author of Appreciative Leadership and The Power of Appreciative Inquiry
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“In this insightful and timely book, Peggy Holman helps us understand the deeper dynamics and principles at play in engaging emergence in constructive ways—enabling unexpected insights and collective intelligence to arise in our midst. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in new ways of working with groups and organizations.”
—Juanita Brown, coFounder, The World Café
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“If Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science opened our horizon to the new realities of contemporary leadership: uncertainty and complexity, this book turns these realities into practical approaches. I predict that for a long time to come the standard reply to the question “But how can we deal with such immense complexity?” will be “Read Engaging Emergence by Peggy Holman. It has the answers you are looking for.”
—Holger Nauheimer, creator and host of the www.change-management-toolbook.com community
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“Peggy Holman’s gem of a guidebook for midwifing collective intelligence and wise co-creativity is brilliant, timely, and well written. It is an indispensable map for successfully navigating humanity’s rite of passage into maturity in the 21st century.”
— Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, endorsed by 6 Nobel Prize-winning scientists
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“In a time of exponential change, ‘change management’ is quaint at best and probably doomed to fail. Our plans will be disrupted. Our expectations turned on their heads. If disturbance is going to be our dance partner from now on, then the tools and principles in this book are the essential safety manual. They also point the way to a thrilling existence.”
—Vicki Robin, author of Your Money Or Your Life
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“The field of emergence is emerging. It affects your life, your work, and the world, and it’s been mostly invisible. Peggy’s book gives you the distinctions to recognize it, the lived experience of it, and the practical levers to make it even more powerful and useful. This is the definitive tool on this subject.”
—Martin Rutte, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work and Chair of the Board, The Centre for Spirituality and the Workplace
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