Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

who get spun into wonder about the natural world and want to know things, who feel and know more than we can say or explain, and want to know how knowing those things can transform the ways we approach changing the world.

I am thrilled by how humans have continuously stood up against our own weaknesses.

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.

I am listening now with all of my senses, as if the whole universe might exist just to teach me more about love.

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions”—I will repeat these words from Nick Obolenksy throughout this book because they are the clearest articulation of emergence that I have come across.

She also said “all that you touch you change / all that you change, changes you.”11

Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.

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

pleasure evokes change—perhaps more than shame. More precisely, where shame makes us freeze and try to get really small and invisible, pleasure invites us to move, to open, to grow.

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.