Emergent Loops
When feedback becomes feedforward—systems training themselves
THE CORE INSIGHT
Complex systems produce behaviors that none of their parts intended.
Your marketing campaign is about to backfire. Your org structure is creating the politics you're trying to eliminate. Your incentive system is optimizing for the wrong thing. And the team who designed it has no idea.
Emergence happens through recursive feedback between components and the whole. Parts interact. Patterns emerge. Patterns change the environment. Parts adapt. New patterns emerge. Infinite loop.
You can't control emergence. But you can design conditions where beneficial patterns are more likely to arise.
START HERE
You Can't Control Emergence
There's a marketing campaign running right now that's about to backfire spectacularly. And the team who created it has no idea.
This is why strategic plans surprise everyone, including their designers.
THE MECHANISM (CHOOSE YOUR ANGLE)
"How do constraints create unexpected behaviors?"
Constraints Design Behavior
"Why can't we go back to how things were?"
You Can't Unlearn Instant
"What stays constant underneath all the change?"
Innovation Serves the Invariant
Most strategy fails because it ignores emergence. These notes explore how systems train themselves—and how to work with that instead of against it.
Subscribe to Emergent Loops notes →
CONNECTED PATTERNS
Emergent Loops connects to Hybrid Intelligence (AI feedback creates unexpected system behaviors) and Momentum Engineering (momentum compounds through recursive loops).