Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

emergent strategy, strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions,

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of

relatively simple interactions.”

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

To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses.

Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute site.7

There are new strategies emerging, or being remembered—many would describe this as a shift from a masculine to feminine

(or patriarchal to feminist) leadership. I see that, and I think it is also about something beyond all of our binaries—evolving in relationship with our hierarchical tendency.

One thing I have observed: When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts. Perhaps humans’ core function is love.

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

empat...

In my longing for depth I have been re-rooting in the earth, in myself and my creativity, in my community, in my spiritual practices, honing in on work that is not only meaningful but feels joyful, listening with less and less judgment to th...

“How do I listen to others? As if everyone were my Teacher, speaking to me (Her) cherished last words.”

Our generation must walk the spiritual path that is available to us only in this time, with its own unique combination of wisdom and creation.

those of us who wish to see a truly, radically different world must demand of

ourselves the possibility that we are called to lead not from right to left, or from minority to majority, but from spirit towards liberation.

Many of us have been socialized to understand that constant growth, violent competition, and critical mass are the ways to create change. But emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend more upon critical, deep, and authentic connections, a thread that can be tugged for support and resilience. The quality of connection between the nodes in the patterns. Dare I say love.

How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material?

Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, racialized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable.

Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream.

Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an i...

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

But what I noticed is that her leaders are adaptive—riding change like dolphins ride the ocean. Adaptive but also intentional,

small patterns that avoid useless predation, spread lessons, and proliferate change.

Biomimetics or biomimicry is the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems.

Permaculture is a system of agricultural and social design principles centered around simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and features observed in natural ecosystems.

critique is a seductress her door is always open

In 1992, 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.

facilitation is the art of making things easy, making it easier for humans to work together and get things done.

facts, guilt, and shame are limited motivations for creating change, even though those are the primary forces we use in our organizing work. I suspect that to really transform our society, we will need to make justice one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have.

There is always enough time for the right work.

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.

Ferns are a form of fractal. A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self similarity, which means it looks roughly the same at any scale. Small-scale solutions impact the whole system. Use similar principles to build at all scales.

Sitting with the questions of how I could transform some of the heartbreak I have experienced in nonprofit work into lessons that could offer other paths forward, I found that part of the opportunity was to pay deeper attention to how the natural world has solved these same problems. I do believe that what we pay attention to grows, so I wanted to stop growing the crises, the critique. The elements in this book are a way to shift my attention to the positive, to what I want to grow.

“Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that has already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn. There are three types of biomimicry—one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem’s level, like building a nature-inspired city.” —Janine Benyus

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.

We learn to deny our longings and

our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness.

We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together.

like this visual of turning and evolving, as opposed to destroying the systems in place now.

Element Nature of Element Fractal The Relationship Between Small and Large Adaptative How We Change Interdependence and Decentralization Who We Are and How We Share Non-linear and Iterative The Pace and Pathways of Change Resilience and Transformative Justice How We Recover and Transform Creating More Possibilities How We Move Towards Life

The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.

we—Americans—don’t know how to do democracy. We don’t know how to make decisions together, how to create generative compromises, how to advance policies that center justice. Most of our movements are reduced to advancing false solutions, things we can get corporate or governmental agreement on, which don’t actually get us where we need to be. 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.

So many of our organizations working for social change are structured in ways that reflect the status quo. We have singular charismatic leaders, top down structures, money-driven programs, destructive methods of engaging conflict, unsustainable work cultures, and little to no impact on the issues at hand.

Grace articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: “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.

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

using the Internet and cellular data to build trust and connection, rather than to echo chamber deconstruction and destruction.