Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

What we are all really asking—what Octavia was asking—is how do we, who know the world needs to change, begin to practice being different? How do we have to be for justice to truly be transformative?

Not them, that massive amorphous “them” that is also us, in our heads and hearts, or that loves us, or that is tired of this shit but is family to us… Not them, because maybe they don’t recognize yet that these changes are the key to human survival. But us, us who are awake and awakening. How do we need to be for Black lives to matter? What do we need to heal in ourselves in order to offer a future of any real peace? Or to become the protagonists of this human story—and earn the flip of the page of all the sentient life in the universe? To claim the future as a compelling place for our miracles?

We are innately cooperative and social beings. I often tell my students that there is a reason humans are born unable to move, dress, eat on their own, unable to protect themselves. We are born into relationships of dependence and interdependence. It’s what we long for, and we struggle within decision-making models and structures that don’t support that deepest desire.