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Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0)

Adrienne Maree Brown

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Nov 16, 2023 ivan rated it it was amazing

Shelves: __anarres, socialchange, _nonfiction, radicalpolitics

A critical toolbox and visionary future for organizers of all types. Adrienne maree brown has synthesized an immense amount of experience, scholarship, exploration, wonder, science, truth, magic, liberation and doubt into one indispensable little volume. Throughout the text, she brings in voices of other organizers, writers (especially Octavia Butler), and loves. Her work is immeasurably better because of this commitment to inclusion.

Her conception of emergent strategy is a response to “a good A critical toolbox and visionary future for organizers of all types. Adrienne maree brown has synthesized an immense amount of experience, scholarship, exploration, wonder, science, truth, magic, liberation and doubt into one indispensable little volume. Throughout the text, she brings in voices of other organizers, writers (especially Octavia Butler), and loves. Her work is immeasurably better because of this commitment to inclusion.

Her conception of emergent strategy is a response to “a good half-century of individualistic linear organizing (led by charismatic individuals or budget-building institutions), which intends to reform or revolutionize society, but falls back into modeling the oppressive tendencies” (8). Instead, emergent strategy focuses on “patterns that cycle upwards” (59), “a system that makes use of everything in the iterative process. It’s all data” (14).

One example brown offers, of facilitating (80):

• less prep, more presence
• low ego, high impact
• building alignment, not selling ideas
• relationship is the measure of our strength
• this will be as amazing as you are
• trust your own work and each other

Brown makes a case for trying and failing — with love and accountability — experimenting with bottom-up movement building. “Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once” (119).

Brown has a powerful chapter on transformative justice, abusive dynamics (in organizations and in love), and liberated relationships. Among the many insights brown makes is this one: “Destroying a person doesn’t destroy all of the systems that allow harmful people to do harm” (146).

Emergent Strategy has both theory and practice — tools you can use today! — on “collaborative ideation,” consensus, sustainable leadership, the value of visionary writing and Afrofuturism, and “fractal organizing.” “We spend our [individual and organizational] lives in unconscious practices,” brown writes, “practices that make us deny our true selves, our true power, our collectivism” (188). “Without intention, we are usually practicing what the dominant society wants us to practice” (256). “If we begin to understand ourselves as practice ground for transformation, we can transform the world” (191).

I highly recommend this book to any social justice organizers, facilitators, organizational leaders, or anyone who wants to integrate personal self-care and radical societal transformation. It builds on lessons from the movements of the ’70s and ’80s, the global justice movement, the Movement for Black Lives, and offers — and synthesizes — dozens of clear-eyed practices for everyday activism. This book should be on your bookshelf! ...more

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Feb 06, 2019 Tara rated it it was amazing

Dec 01, 2017 Tara rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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