Launch Update and Principle One

From turbulence to murmerations

Launch Recap

As you probably know, my new book Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World, launched last Thursday.

At least the Kindle version did. (Just 99 cents for the first month!) Due to some technical issues — probably not big tech censoring me — the paperback wasn’t available until midday on Friday.

All is good now, however. Both the paperback and the Kindle version are live. I’m excited to see how many people are already engaging with these ideas.

Posts on Principles

I’ll be rolling out social media posts about the book’s Six Principles of an Emergent Mindset. Posts about the first principle, “Expect complicated results even from simple actions,” went live on Twitter and LinkedIn this morning. I’d really appreciate your support amplifying those posts.

Here’s what I said about Principle One in the book’s introduction:

Expect complicated results even from simple actions. Complex group behaviors can and often do emerge from many interactions of individual actors following simple rules. Likewise, when we take a simple action expecting a predictable result, if that action feeds into a complex system, we should expect the unexpected. And when we see a complex phenomenon, we should consider whether it is generated by relatively simple individual behaviors repeated many times across many individuals.

One of the most mesmerizing examples of this principle is starling murmerations - yes, the birds. When starlings flock, they appear to follow very simple rules about how far to stay from their neighboring birds. Yet the resultant evolving clusters are neither rigidly ordered or completely chaotic. Instead, they exhibit the complex beauty of emergent order. Check out this video:

Emergent order often looks better in video

In fact, murmerations inspired the many-arrowed cover of my book:

I put a bird on it.

Leading a complex system means influencing the direction of the flock without being in control of it. And to do so effectively, leaders should follow Principle One: expect complicated results even from simple actions.