  Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a
growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as
wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the
general patterns of how growth produces both successful and failing new designs
for new systems can be a great teacher of what does and does not successfully
work. Our own world culture imperils its survival by being unresponsive to
change as our world economy has; driven to endlessly maximize its compound
growth and so growing conflict with internal and external systems. New methods
now let us compare different kinds of growth systems in their natural contexts
to expose their different ways of coupling with their contexts and steering in
response to their futures. Some work out fine by respecting internal limits and
finding a fit with external parts, and so working adaptively for survival as a
whole. For living systems, steering is much improved by rich experience of
external contexts, allowing more prompt attention and response to new risks and
opportunities. Recognizing emerging systems starts with noticing change
associated with a growing center of relationships, a nucleus of activity in a
nourishing place, something sprouting. Storms, trees, relationships, organisms,
businesses, organizations, cultures, etc., all start as emerging centers of
design that develop by capturing resources from their contexts to expand their
ability to capture more. As such, growth begins and develops as a natural
exploratory process, starting with compound growth and needing to creatively
respond to its natural limits to achieve long life and a stable place in the
world. The coupling of internal human thoughts and external worlds matters,
too; however, only indirectly connected with our contexts, our fixed images of
a changing world can blind us to the meanings of life.
