What's in the name?

Most people will have come across the (slightly editorialised) version of Aristotle's quote. Almost 2,400 years ago, he already observed that some things had properties that couldn't be explained by the properties of their building blocks. Another word for this phenomenon is Emergence.

Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties that are not observed in the parts on their own, but which emerge when the parts interact as a whole. A traffic jam cannot be observed in a single car, but the aggregation of many cars will lead to a traffic jam in many situations. Similarly, conciseness cannot be observed in a single brain cell, but connecting billions of them together in a brain produces consciousness.

Emergence is traditionally a difficult concept to analyse as it cannot be reduced to an analysis of the systems constituent parts. It needs to be understood at the level of the whole system and as such, the problem solving approach needs to address these different levels during the solution design and implementation. In addition to the analysis of the problem we require the synthesis of the solution.

We see our mission the same way. Joining our consulting capabilities with the business and challenges of our clients will create new opportunities and solutions that did not exist before. We want to contribute something new to the business of out customers and we understand that this will only be successful when done as a joint undertaking. We are strong believers in complexity science and want to take our clients along on the journey to explore new approaches to complex problems.