This book, written by leading experts in the field, is intended for thoughtful leaders, advisors, and academics who want to better understand cutting edge thinking and the latest research on leadership in the complex, highly interconnected organization of today. Unlike most books on the subject, it does not purport to provide simple answers to difficult questions. Rather, it seeks to provide new insights and tools that have only recently become apparent through advances in complexity science-like, for example, the intricate dynamics of emergent leadership as simulated through agent-based modeling (ABM). Complex Systems Leadership Theory is a powerful beginning to what promises to be a deeper, more thoughtful investigation of how and why organizations succeed and what leaders can do to make a difference.

How do organizations become created? Entrepreneurship scholars have debated this question for decades, but only recently have they been able to gain insights into the non-linear dynamics that lead to organizational emergence, through the use of the complexity sciences. Written for social science researchers, Generative Emergence summarizes these literatures, including the first comprehensive review of each of the 15 complexity science disciplines. In doing so, the book makes a bold proposal for a discipline of Emergence, and explores one of its proposed fields, namely Generative Emergence. The book begins with a detailed summary of its underlying science, dissipative structures theory, and rigorously maps the processes of order creation discovered by that science to identify a 5-phase model of order creation in entrepreneurial ventures. The second half of the book presents the findings from an experimental study that tested the model in four fast-growth ventures through a year-long, week-by-week longitudinal analysis of their processes, based on over 750 interviews and 1000 hours of on-site observation. These data, combined with reports from over a dozen other studies, confirm the dynamics of the 5-phase model in multiple contexts. By way of conclusion, the book explores how the model of Generative Emergence could be applied to enact emergence within and across organizations.