Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

realize how important emergent strategy, strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions, is to me—the potential scale of transformation that could come from movements intentionally practicing this adaptive, relational way of being, on our own and with others.

life-code—awakening us to the sacred systems of life all around us. Many of us have been and are becoming students of these systems of life, wondering if in fact we can unlock some crucial understanding about our own humanity if we pay closer attention to this place we are from, the bodies we are in.

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”2

Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind.

Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

to turn our legacy towards harmony.

radically change the world.3 To

The natural world actually supports any worldview—competitive, powerless, isolationist, violent.

I am open to critiques of course, if they are offered in the spirit of collective liberation.

Octavia Butler, one of the cornerstones of my awareness of emergent strategy, spoke of the fatal human flaw as a combination of hierarchy and intelligence.6 We are brilliant at survival, but brutal at it.

My hope is that this content will deepen and soften that intelligence such that we can align our behavior, our structures and our movements with our visions of justice and liberation, and give those of us co-creating the future more options for working with each other and embodying the things we fight for—dignity, collective power, love, generative conflict, and community.

don’t want to be the owner of this, just a joyful conduit.

I follow other people’s leadership around math, I offer leadership around healing, which comes more naturally to me.

How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?

If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression.

We would organize with the perspective that there is wisdom and experience and amazing story in the communities we love, and instead of starting up new ideas/organizations all the time, we would want to listen, support, collaborate, merge, and grow through fusion, not competition. We would understand that the strength of our movement is in the strength of our relationships, which could only be measured by their depth. Scaling up would mean going deeper, being more vulnerable and more empathetic.

In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal—the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.

I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.

Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together.

Strategy is a military term simply meaning a plan of action towards a goal.

Emergent strategies are ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions.

At this point, we have all of the information we need to create a change; it isn’t a matter of facts. It’s a matter of longing, having the will to imagine and implement something else. We are living in the ancestral imagination of others, with their longing for safety and abundance, a longing that didn’t include us, or included us as enemy, fright, other.

In many of her books, she shows us how radical ideas spread through conversation, questions, one to one interactions. Social

Not one perfect path forward, but an abundance of futures, of ways to manage resources together, to be brilliant together.

So, ok, but what EXACTLY is emergent strategy? Emergent Strategy: was, initially, a way of describing the adaptive and relational leadership model found in the work of Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler (and others).

ways for humans to practice being in right relationship to our home and each other, to practice complexity, and grow a compelling future together through relatively simple interactions. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for. and maybe, if I’m honest, it’s a philosophy for how to be in harmony and love, in and with the world.

you are the one you are waiting for

Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science,

everything is about relationships, critical connections; chaos is an essential process that we need to engage; the sharing of information is fundamental for organizational success; and vision is an invisible field that binds us together, emerging from relationships and chaos and information.

organic intellectual who could take these concepts into daily life and community work. Grace taught me dialectical humanism—the cycle of collective transformation of beliefs that occurs as we gather new information and experiences, meaning that, over time, we can understand and hold a position we previously believed to be wrong.23

Simple means that it boils down to relationships between individual people, objects, beings, truths. Ease has more to do with the amount of friction (or understanding) between the peopleobjectsbeingstruths. And part of what can clear a path to making things easier is to name the simple interactions at play in a complex system.”

We try to leverage control over the natural world by making our emotions and sensations less reliable than our thoughts, and then burn at the stake anyone who stays attuned to the ways and power of pleasure in the natural world.

I spent the first part of my life learning what history’s victors wanted to tell me to believe about the past, including the simple assumption that it was the past.

the Black Panthers (meet the biological needs of a community as a mode of organizing);

There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have.35 Find it.

Move at the speed of trust.38 Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships. Less prep, more presence.

We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance.

It is time to turn capitalism into a fossil, time to turn the soil, turn to the horizon together.

It was and is devastatingly clear to me that until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally, we won’t be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally.

“Transform yourself to transform the world.” This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.

My life is a miracle that cannot be recreated. I can never get these hours, weeks, years back. In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.

We have to create futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same kind of person. That’s the problem with most utopias for me: they are presented as mono value,

Gar Alperovitz’s writing speaks to me—what’s between capitalism and socialism?46

We need to move from competitive ideation, trying to push our individual ideas, to collective ideation, collaborative ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people.

When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal.

General Baker, a Detroit labor organizer and leader, who said, “You keep asking how do we get the people here? I say, what will we do when they get here?”

The frustrations folks had with Ruckus are very much the frustrations alive in our movements right now—we had a vision for the kind of world we wanted to see, but we weren’t modeling that internally.

there are enough people out there to support the movement(s) we need, but currently, organizations are pitted against each other to access money (less and less money), rather than creating and investing together to maximize a diversity of resources from money, to people, to spaces, to skills. Because we are not investing in a shared network of resources, it is easy to let structural and ideological particularities create deep splits throughout the non-profit sphere, rendering much of our work useless.

it’s not unusual to see time and energy poured into actions that are more interesting/funny/creative than they are compelling to those we are trying to reach and/or life-changing to the communities taking action. To be clear, we are moving in a good direction in being funny and creative—we want to engage people—but our standards for communities taking the risks associated with direct action must be that the experience and the results are compelling, even life-changing.

One indicator that things are off is when impacted communities and people of color get involved and they are put in the role of “performing the action,” for example, having their photos taken, being spokespeople, or being asked to endorse or represent work they don’t get to lead, etc., while most of the background organizing is still dominated by the folks who aren’t impacted and won’t be around long term to sustain the campaign or to be held accountable.