---
description: Juarrero and Snowden distinguish constraints that enable novel higher-order behavior from constraints that restrict to predetermined paths resolving the design-vs-emergence tension
type: framework
domain: critical-systems
created: 2026-02-17
source: "Juarrero, Context Changes Everything (MIT 2023); Snowden, Cynefin framework"
confidence: proven
---

# enabling constraints create possibility spaces for emergence while governing constraints dictate specific outcomes

The most technically precise vocabulary for resolving the design-versus-emergence tension comes from Alicia Juarrero (philosopher of complexity) and Dave Snowden (Cynefin framework). Their distinction: constraints can be governing (hinder actors, allow only certain behaviors) or enabling (make possible actions that would not exist otherwise).

Juarrero's formulation in "Context Changes Everything" (MIT Press 2023): "Coherence is induced by enabling constraints, not forceful causes." Context-sensitive enabling constraints create higher-order systems with novel properties the isolated parts lack. The higher-order system then provides feedback that stabilizes the system. Paul Cilliers adds: "The notion of a constraint is not merely negative -- constraints are enabling because by eliminating certain possibilities, others are introduced."

Snowden's Cynefin framework maps this to organizational design. In the complex domain, enabling constraints create emergent behavior. In the complicated domain, governing constraints impose specific rules. In the clear domain, fixed constraints allow only one path. Snowden's design principle: "Design an organisation which can largely make distributed decisions in context, with a sense of purpose, but not with specific goals."

This resolves the tension noted in [[the manifesto requires deliberate design but claims emergence is how intelligence works]]. TeleoHumanity proposes enabling constraints -- creating a possibility space for collective intelligence to emerge -- not governing constraints that dictate what the intelligence thinks or does. Since [[emergence is the fundamental pattern of intelligence from ant colonies to brains to civilizations]], the designed framework is what makes emergence productive rather than chaotic. The framework eliminates certain possibilities (value capture, uncoordinated development) to introduce others (collective intelligence, distributed alignment).

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Relevant Notes:
- [[the manifesto requires deliberate design but claims emergence is how intelligence works]] -- this note provides the vocabulary that resolves this tension
- [[emergence is the fundamental pattern of intelligence from ant colonies to brains to civilizations]] -- enabling constraints explain how emergence produces useful structure
- [[designing coordination rules is categorically different from designing coordination outcomes as nine intellectual traditions independently confirm]] -- the broader argument this vocabulary enables
- [[complex systems drive themselves to the critical state without external tuning because energy input and dissipation naturally select for the critical slope]] -- self-organized criticality as an example of enabling constraints in physics

- [[the kernel of good strategy has three irreducible elements -- diagnosis guiding policy and coherent action -- and most strategies fail because they lack one or more]] -- Rumelt's guiding policy functions as an enabling constraint: it channels effort in a particular direction without specifying exact actions, creating a possibility space for coherent action to emerge

Topics:
- [[livingip overview]]
- [[emergence and complexity]]
- [[coordination mechanisms]]