Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Dandelions don’t know whether they are a weed or a brilliance.

Together we must move like waves. Have you observed the ocean? The waves are not the same over and over—each one is unique and responsive. The goal is not to repeat each other’s motion, but to respond in whatever way feels right in your body. The waves we create are both continuous and a one-time occurrence. We must notice what it takes to respond well. How it feels to be in a body, in a whole—separate, aligned, cohesive. Critically connected.

This can’t be the purpose of our species, to constantly identify each other as “other,” build walls between us, and engage in both formal and informal wars against each other’s bodies.

Once there were kings and queens all over the earth. Someday we might speak of presidents and CEOs in past tense only.

We are in an imagination battle.

As Toni Cade Bambara has taught us, we must make just and liberated futures irresistible.