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"It is so important that we fight for the future, get into the game, get dirty, get experimental. How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material? We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure, because it's all data. But first we imagine."

Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen.

The social and environmental challenges we face today are not only complex, they are also systemic and structural and have no obvious solutions. They require diverse combinations of people, organizations, and sectors to coordinate actions and work together even when the way forward is unclear. Even so, collaborative efforts often fail because they attempt to navigate complexity with traditional strategic plans, created by hierarchies that ignore the way people naturally connect.

Future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal ran a social simulation game in 2008 that had players dealing with the effects of a respiratory pandemic set to happen in the next decade. She wasn't literally predicting the 2020 pandemic-but she got eerily close. Her game, set in 2019, featured scenarios we're now familiar with (like masking and social distancing), and participant reactions gave her a sense of what the world could-and eventually, did-look like. How did she do it? And what can we learn from this experiment to predict-and prepare for-the future ourselves? In this episode, Jane teaches us how to be futurists, and talks about the role of imagination-and gaming-in shaping a future that we're truly excited about.

"Imagine a world in which each learner is unconstrained by systems and structures of oppression. Creating such a world might seem impossible, yet making education liberatory is the most pressing challenge that education stakeholders face as we look to its future. If we do not join together to face our current and developing realities head on, we will not create better futures for each learner. Moreover, our inaction will exacerbate historic and systemic inequities, bringing education systems to the brink of collapse."

KnowledgeWorks latest future of education forecast - March 2022

Modern society is plagued by fragmentation. The various sectors of our communities--businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government--do not work together. They exist in their own worlds. As do so many individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. This disconnection and detachment makes it hard if not impossible to envision a common future and work towards it together. We know what healthy communities look like--there are many success stories out there, and they've been described in detail. What Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation: How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? He explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

"Here's what we heard, over and over again: What's true of the vision and learning model for the kids needs to be true of the professional culture and operating norms of the adults. To help students become capable, caring, self-directed learners and creative problem-solvers, these educators believe, their schools should deliberately model those same attributes for them-in their design of learning, for sure, but also in the ways the adults work together, address problems, design systems and procedures, and engage with the community."