Welcome to Emerge Austin Gathering, 2022

We are gathering in Austin at a particular moment in time. The pandemic has highlighted the world’s existing societal, economic and cultural problems and created many others. There is a slow but quickening shift in geological time underway due to human activity, which means a permanent ecological emergency is the new normal. The ubiquity of smart phones and the business models behind them mean that we are not always living in a shared reality. It is a turbulent time to be a human being, and it asks a great deal from those who feel called to respond to the challenges it entails.

Emerge Austin is a gathering of remarkable individuals and groups pursuing important and potentially transformative projects in many different sectors - a kind of ‘meeting of the tribes’. This is the first Emerge event in North America after three successful Emerge Gatherings in Berlin (2018 and 2021) and Kyiv (2019) in Europe.

Collective action needs collective understanding. Legacy institutions across sectors are struggling to make sense of this historical moment because what’s called for goes beyond business as usual, or even innovation. What’s called for is the capacity to think and feel across different frames and different contexts at scale.

While our projects and approaches might look different from the outside, we are all in some important way trying to support the same – urgently needed – societal transformation. The success of this transformation is by no means assured, and what it looks like is not yet clear. If we knew exactly what the end point would look like, it wouldn’t be a genuine transformation. This is what emergence means.

The different ‘tribes’ that gather here in Austin are often visionaries, but they are also a bit like the blind people trying to describe the elephant through touching only one part of it. We each understand something true, but partial, because we don’t, and perhaps cannot, see the whole. Emerge helps to join the dots between the tribes and hopefully helps us all to see a fuller picture.

What unites most of us is a perception that we are in a time between worlds. We also tend to share the view that the pattern of change called for will include tenacious engagement with what is inside us and between us as much as what is outside us. The increasing complexity of our outer world has to be matched by an increase in capacity of our inner worlds to handle cognitive, relational and emotional complexity. We are open to exploring new and old ways of knowing and being. We are also united by a post-conventional ethos, seeking solutions outside of the kinds of people, policies and practices that are often offered up as the only way. And we know we need to get real, because the world is full of people with values and aims that are very different from our own, so it is not enough to assume cooperation will prevail.

In this cultural space there is now a field of understanding and praxis emerging. Parts of it has been called the liminal web or the sensemaking community or the metamodern ecosystem, even though many of us gathering here do not identify with any of these labels. But this field is forming around us, whether we are aware of it or not. Whether we name it or not, it has attracted us here to Austin.

This Emerge Gathering is about us all collectively discovering this field, exploring our individual and organizational relationships to it, and self-consciously supporting its emergent evolution. All this with the understanding that a strong field will help all of our individual projects, as well as directly seeking to influence a cultural shift.

During our 48 hours or so together in Austin we will only be able to scratch the surface of this huge task. But we will be starting a process that will continue beyond our meeting. Knowing the humbling challenges facing our gathering, we seek to do the following:

Increase collective awareness and direction - theory

We want to hear from all the new tribes (Web3.0/modern psychedelic medicine, etc), and also to learn from the experience of many of the people who've been engaged in this conversation for many years (integral/developmental thinking, etc). Some of the best outcomes may happen spontaneously in the 'spaces in between' – so do make an effort to connect with others.

We will ask questions like: What does a ’third attractor’ look like, when collapse or coercive control look like the more probable futures. How do we get there? What are our theories of change? What defines our emerging field?

Practice collective sense making and collective intelligence - praxis

Sensing into what is emerging, we will experiment, fail and learn. The gathering is a meeting place where we want to try out and practice approaches that can help us cohere as a whole and where the collective intelligence can arise beyond the sum of the group. We want to embody the evolutionary process of the universe and be self-conscious agents - individually and collectively - of emergence.

Work on a practical, entrepreneurial level with projects and resources - reality

Meet old and new contacts, build network; especially the important ‘weak ties’ that network theory tells us are critical to innovation and emergence. How do we support each other practically? What projects and resources are relevant to the goals of the field? For instance, narrative, communication and finance coordination.

Our time together in Austin is limited. Our calling is infinite.

Let’s find a way together to be both dreaming idealists and pragmatic realists.

Welcome to Austin!

Tomas Björkman, Pamela von Sabljar and the Emerge Team