Three aspects of an emergent property
When a property of a system cannot be traced back to any of the individual parts in the system, it is called an emergent property.
Your personality is an emergent property of your brain. It cannot be traced back to individual neurons. Likewise, fluidity is an emergent property of water, and culture is an emergent property of a group of people.
Three aspects are important for a property to be emergent:
…supervenience is the observation that the property will no longer exist if you take away the individual parts of the system. For example, your personality disappears when I remove your neurons.
…the property should not be an aggregate, meaning that it is not simply the result of adding up the properties of the individual parts. For example, a single water molecule has no fluidity. So you cannot simply add up the fluidities of a billion individual molecules to determine the fluidity of water.
…downward causality, meaning that the emergent property should influence the behavior of the individual parts. For example, the culture of a group of people influences the behavior of its members…
Related
…organizations are not living systems. As a result, drawing examples from physics, chemistry and biology to discuss self-organization and emergence doesn’t work for me in relation to the dynamics of organizations.
So I’m afraid that, in an organizational context at least, I can see no situation in which a self-organizing ‘system’ has no emergent properties. As you’re aware, I talk of organizations not as systems but (interchangeably) as either “dynamic networks of self-organizing conversations” or as “complex social processes” (of people interacting together). As such, self-organization is the fundamental dynamic of organization, out of which outcomes perpetually emerge
