September 2, 2026: Salus Forum

Jack

Thank you, Bill. With regard to adaptive leadership, there’s sort of three levels that Bill and I considered during our conversation. The first is a philosophical foundation regarding adaptive leadership. How have animals and humans evolved in geologic time? The relationship between cyclical and linear time, that kind of stuff. There are historical considerations in adaptive leadership, whether the concept comes from a collection of people or from individuals such as Caesar, Christ, Buddha, Alfred North Whitehead. And then there’s sort of what most of us think of in terms of adaptive leadership, which is the modern application. From business, or medical systems. McChrystal team of teams, Ronald Heifetz, et cetera. Addressing what is the application of adaptive. Having considered these broader notions of adaptive leadership, Bill and I came on to this emergence concept.

And I think emergence sort of fits all three of these levels. It has some philosophical foundations. It has some historical considerations, and it has some modern applications. And I think there are a couple of provocative pieces that I just want to leave you with. Sort of comparing murmurations. That’s when the birds sort of fly together in those formations, versus a stampede, where the cattle are in chaos. And even at that, towards the end of a stampede, the cattle are still individuals, maybe going in the same direction, but not looking like a murmuration, not moving like a murmuration, they’re still individual animals in that.

And one of the provocative pieces I just want to leave you with concerns how humans think about that? I used to enjoy murmurations, now I find them very troubling, because the reason a murmuration works is because it leaves out any differently abled bird. Any bird that is not able to respond to its seven neighbors, any bird that’s injured, any bird that’s sick, is left out.

Murmurations only work when all those birds in the flock are healthy. That is not the way humans operate. And so, while murmurations sound and look beautiful, they’re actually an abasement to sort of human caring for one another.

There is another thing I want to say about stampedes. I think one of the most common sort of hard emergent groups that is like a stampede is human produced. This is the suburb of houses in a row, built out of ticky tacky, and they all look the same, and they’re all individual. While they look like they’re a group flowing together, like a stampede, they’re actually all individual. Humans have tried to think about how we do murmurations, how do we do this emergent piece. AS Bill mentioned, I think an example of successful emergence concerns people walking through an airport. However, I think the most successful is either the interstate system, where cars flow in and out, blinkers, no blinkers, or the round-abouts. From an evidence-based perspective, the most effective murmuration for humans is the roundabout intersection, where traffic accidents drop by 60 percent, and traffic fatalities drop by 90 percent, because they force you into this murmuration of flow in and out of the system.

I’m going to just say one last story. It’s a saying that we have in our community to honor the group process. It says, you know, when you’re out hiking in the woods, the first person to see the moose did not invent the moose. I think that is one of these cases of emergence that is unexpected. We didn’t expect to see the moose, but we could predict that when the group does something together, something bigger than the group may occur.