Author: Moh Al-Haifi
Co-Author: Isabelle Drury
Contributors: Odette Bester, Lee Fitzpatrick, Zac Schaap
In a world obsessed with predictability and control, conventional marketing strategies often promise direct paths from action to outcome. Create this campaign, get this many leads. Send these emails, generate this much revenue
But what if there’s a more powerful approach that embraces the beautiful complexity of living systems?
The Theory of Emergence offers exactly this shift. Consider the beaver: it doesn’t plan to create a wetland ecosystem, it simply builds a dam. Yet from this single action emerges a thriving network of life as water slows, plants take root, and creatures gather. No master plan, just the right conditions.
Similarly, when thousands of starlings dance across twilight skies, no choreographer directs their breathtaking movements. Each bird follows simple rules of distance and alignment, yet together they create fluid patterns of extraordinary complexity and beauty.
This is emergence at work, where unexpected, often transformative results arise naturally from healthy systems rather than through rigid control. First introduced to us through nRhythm’s regenerative organisation approach, this concept perfectly complements regenerative marketing principles, where success isn’t measured merely in quarterly profits but in the health of your entire ecosystem: your team, your customers, your community, and the living world we all share.
This article explores how creating the right conditions, rather than forcing predetermined results, can lead to outcomes far more meaningful than anything we could have engineered directly.
What is the Theory of Emergence?
The Theory of Emergence is a strategic framework that helps organisations align their resources, activities, and goals with a larger vision while embracing complexity and interconnectedness. Its fundamental premise is that emergent outcomes, those that couldn’t have been predicted or controlled in advance, are often the most valuable and transformative results of our work.
“So, how is this different from conventional strategic planning?” Well, most conventional marketing operates on the fantasy that if you just find the perfect funnel template or magic headline formula, success is guaranteed. We feel the equivalent of believing that if you arrange your desk items in the perfect Feng Shui configuration, venture capital will start raining from the sky.
The Theory of Emergence doesn’t abandon planning, no, quite the opposite. It creates a more thoughtful, nuanced approach by focusing on creating optimal conditions where positive emergent outcomes can flourish.
For impact-driven organisations and regenerative businesses, this shift is revolutionary. Instead of trying to force predetermined outcomes through increasingly aggressive tactics, we can focus on cultivating the right conditions, both internally and externally, and allow more authentic, sustainable emergent results to blossom naturally.
Inspired by Theory of Change
Many change-makers in the nonprofit world are already familiar with the Theory of Change, a methodology that helps organisations map out how their activities lead to desired outcomes. It’s been a powerful tool for planning and evaluating impact, particularly for social and environmental initiatives.
The Theory of Emergence builds upon this foundation but incorporates a distinctly regenerative lens. While a conventional Theory of Change often assumes linear pathways and predetermined outcomes, the Theory of Emergence embraces the inherent uncertainty and adaptability of living systems, with special attention to emergent outcomes that couldn’t have been precisely predicted.
“That sounds cool and all, but makes this approach truly regenerative?” Instead of prescribing exactly what outcomes must occur, it focuses on creating the conditions that allow novel, positive change to emerge organically. For marketing and growth activities specifically, the Theory of Emergence provides a framework that aligns strategic decisions with deeper purpose while remaining adaptive to changing conditions. It helps teams prioritise initiatives that truly matter rather than chasing every possible tactic or trend, creating space for unexpected outcomes to emerge.
This isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Like any living system, your organisation’s context evolves. That’s why we recommend revisiting this framework at least annually, ensuring you remains aligned with both your purpose and the changing ecosystem around you, while staying open to the emergent outcomes that continue to develop.
To help you apply this approach practically, let’s break down the five stages of cultivating emergence, a natural progression that mirrors how living systems develop and thrive.
The five stages of cultivating emergence
The Theory of Emergence follows a natural progression that mirrors how living systems develop and evolve. Each element builds upon the previous one, creating a coherent flow from foundational conditions to emerging possibilities, with a particular focus on the emergent outcomes that arise throughout the process.
This framework spans different time horizons: from immediate conditions and actions, through mid-term impacts (1-5 years), to long-term emergent futures (5-10 years). By considering these different timeframes together, you create alignment between present actions and future possibilities while remaining open to emergent outcomes at each stage.
Let’s explore each element and what it means for your marketing:
1. Seed: Thrivability conditions
Just as a seed requires specific soil conditions, moisture, and light to germinate, your initiatives need certain foundational elements to thrive. Thrivability goes beyond merely surviving or sustaining, it’s about creating conditions where everything can flourish and reach its full potential. Think of it as the difference between a plant that’s just staying alive versus one that’s vibrantly healthy, producing abundant fruit, and contributing to its ecosystem.
These conditions might include team health and wellbeing, adequate budgets, supportive mindsets, strategic partnerships, technological resources, or operational structures. The key is identifying what specific conditions will create the optimal environment for unexpected positive outcomes to emerge.
Unlike conventional planning that often overlooks these foundations in favour of immediate tactics, the Theory of Emergence recognises that nothing can succeed without fertile ground. By attending to these conditions first, you create resilience and capacity that supports everything that follows, including the emergent outcomes that often provide the greatest value.
Reflective journaling prompt: What are the conditions that your organisation needs in order for it to thrive and reach its emerging outcomes?
2. Grow: Key organisational growth initiatives
From well-prepared soil, growth naturally emerges. In this element, you identify the strategic priorities and key activities that deserve your focus in the coming year. These aren’t random tactics but carefully chosen initiatives that build upon your thrivability conditions and align with your larger purpose, while creating space for unexpected emergent outcomes.
For marketing and growth specifically, these initiatives might include developing new content platforms, launching community-building programs, redesigning customer experiences, or implementing regenerative practices in your communications. The key is selectivity, choosing fewer, more impactful initiatives rather than attempting to do everything at once, allowing room for emergent possibilities to develop.
This focused approach embodies the principles of “Essentialism” as described in Greg McKeown’s influential book (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less), helping teams avoid the common trap of endless tactical execution without strategic direction. By identifying the essential activities that truly matter, you can allocate resources more effectively and create space for deeper work rather than constant reactivity, creating conditions where emergent outcomes can flourish.
Reflective journaling prompt: What are your key organisational growth initiatives that will help you create the desired/planned outcomes?
3. Produce: Intended outcomes/outputs
As your initiatives take root and develop, they naturally produce specific outcomes: the immediate, tangible results of your activities. These are the visible “fruits” that demonstrate your initiatives are working as intended, while also creating the foundation for unexpected emergent outcomes.
These outcomes might include increased engagement with your content, growing community participation, improved customer feedback, or enhanced team collaboration. They provide concrete indicators that your growth initiatives are generating positive results, both planned and emergent.
While conventional marketing often fixates exclusively on metrics like conversion rates or revenue targets, the Theory of Emergence takes a more holistic view. It considers not just financial outcomes but also relationship quality, ecosystem health, and team wellbeing as critical indicators of success, recognising that the most valuable emergent outcomes often arise in these less quantifiable dimensions.
By tracking these diverse outcomes, you gain insight into how your initiatives are performing while remaining open to unexpected emergent results that might suggest new opportunities you couldn’t have anticipated when you began.
Reflective journaling prompt: What are the outputs that you are planning for that will help you reach your impact?
4. Effect: Deeper impact
Beyond immediate outcomes lie deeper impacts, the mid-term effects that emerge as your work ripples outward into your wider ecosystem. This is where your marketing and growth activities begin to create meaningful change in the 1-5 year timeframe, often generating emergent outcomes that surpass what you could have directly planned.
Impact might manifest as transformed relationships with customers, shifts in industry conversations, enhanced community resilience, or evolution in how your organisation operates. These effects aren’t just about what you’ve done, but how your activities have influenced larger systems, creating conditions for emergent outcomes to develop at the ecosystem level.
In other words, success doesn’t just mean ‘we sent more emails this quarter than last quarter’ or ‘our corporate TikTok dance challenge got seven views instead of the usual three’!
This element serves as the bridge between your short-term actions and long-term vision. By identifying the impacts you intend to create, you maintain connection to purpose while acknowledging that exact outcomes may unfold in unexpected ways, generating emergent results that couldn’t have been precisely engineered.
Reflective journaling prompt: What is the measurable and planned for impact that you are wanting to create in the world and to your ecosystem?
5. Dreams: Emerging outcomes
The final element looks toward the potential futures that might emerge in the 5-10 year timeframe as a result of the conditions you’ve cultivated. Unlike conventional strategic planning that attempts to prescribe exactly what will happen years in advance, the Theory of Emergence acknowledges the inherent unpredictability of complex systems and celebrates the potential for transformative emergent outcomes.
These aren’t rigid targets but visionary possibilities, dreams of what emergent outcomes might arise when the right conditions are nurtured over time. By articulating these potential futures, you create an inspiring north star while remaining open to how the path might unfold in unexpected ways, generating results more beautiful and impactful than could have been precisely planned.
This is perhaps the most profound difference from conventional planning approaches. Rather than creating an illusion of control over long-term outcomes, you cultivate conditions for positive emergence while embracing the creative potential of uncertainty and the transformative power of emergent outcomes.
Reflective journaling prompt: What are the potential emergent outcomes that you could dream of that can help you create long term systemic impact and change?
How to complete your reflections:
Though these elements are numbered 1-5, the Theory of Emergence framework is not meant to be followed linearly from start to finish. Instead, for maximum effectiveness, we recommend working through them in the order of the accompanying graph for a visual representation of how these elements interact in a cyclical process.
Why does the Theory of Emergence matter right now?
In a world facing accelerating climate change, social upheaval, and unprecedented ecological disruption, rigid planning frameworks increasingly fall short. The Theory of Emergence offers a more adaptive approach that creates space for valuable emergent outcomes.
It creates alignment around essential activities, focusing teams on what truly matters while reducing fragmented efforts. By bridging present actions to future vision, it connects immediate tactics to long-term purpose, enhancing motivation and creating pathways for emergent outcomes.
The framework builds genuine resilience by considering the health of the entire ecosystem, your team, customers, community, and environment, creating conditions where transformative emergent outcomes can flourish. Rather than clinging to rigid plans, it provides direction while maintaining adaptability to unexpected opportunities.
Perhaps most powerfully, this approach liberates us from self-imposed limitations, opening doorways to possibilities we couldn’t have imagined within conventional frameworks. For founding teams especially, it offers a path to release the illusion of control, redirecting that energy toward what can actually be influenced in the present moment. When embraced fully, the Theory of Emergence unlocks a natural state of flow and abundance, creating the conditions where even seemingly insurmountable challenges can be transformed through collective wisdom and emergent solutions.
As you embrace this regenerative approach, you may find that not only do your strategies become more effective, but the work itself becomes more meaningful. There’s profound satisfaction in cultivating conditions for positive change and witnessing the beautiful emergent outcomes that arise when we work with rather than against the living world.
So perhaps it’s time we all give ourselves permission to create space for wonderful surprises in our marketing efforts. After all, some of the best things in business and life happen not because we planned them down to the last detail, but because we created fertile conditions where good things could grow in their own unique way.
By shifting from control to cultivation, we open possibilities for emergent impact that conventional marketing simply cannot achieve. We invite you to explore and download our Go-To-Ecosystem Framework cards, a resource to inspire your journey toward more regenerative marketing practices that honour your values and nurture lasting positive impact.
