Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

The less I engage in gossip, the less I harbor suspicion, the more space I find within myself for miraculous experiences. When I fear the universe, I fear myself. When I love and am in awe of the universe, I love and am in awe of myself.9 Imagine then, the power when I align with the universe. Nothing is required of me more than being, and creating. Simultaneously being present with who I am, who we are as a species…and creating who we must become, and within that who I must become.

The idea of interdependence is that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from.

Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves—how do I learn from this?

the emotion is a living thing—showing one face when it arrives, and as it leaves i see it’s really a pattern, delta-ish, blood in veins connecting aspects of myself as disparate as lung and toe.

No one is special, and everyone is needed.

There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.

It is so important to cultivate our patience, our thoughtfulness, our willingness to slow down and seek the wisdom of those not already part of our movements—not to get them in step with our point of view, but because we need their lived experiential wisdom to shape solutions that will work for the majority of living beings.

Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.