I got a request last week 'to explore developing and delivering a Business Change function: how it might be structured, and its milestones and deliverables'. It came at the same point as the question, from Peter Murchland, 'can we or how can we design for emergence'?
At first glance, they seemed to be opposing notions. In the Donald Rumsfeld spectrum of 'There are known knowns, there are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns', business change typology seems to be more comfortable at the known knowns end, a kind of reductionist view of the work, and emergence typology at the unknown unknowns end a kind of holistic view of the world.
As I was musing on the two I remembered a picture I once had on my wall. It was a drawing by French illustrator Jean Olivier Heron, called 'Comment naissent les bateaux' (How boats are born). It showed a yawl gradually emerging through a sequence of drawings that started with a butterfly-winged mermaid hatching. (See it here).