Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”2 It is another way of speaking about the connective tissue of all that exists—the way, the Tao, the force, change, God/dess, life. Birds flocking, cells splitting, fungi whispering underground.

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

am offering this content as a cluster of thoughts in development, observations of existing patterns, and questions of how we apply the brilliance of the world around us to our efforts to coexist in and with this world as humans, particularly for those of us seeking to transform the crises of our time, to turn our legacy towards harmony.

The natural world actually supports any worldview—competitive, powerless, isolationist, violent.

Staying focused on our foundational miraculous nature is actually very hard work in our modern culture of deconstruction. We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses.

My favorite life forms right now are dandelions and mushrooms—the resilience in these structures, which we think of as weeds and fungi, the incomprehensible scale, the clarity of identity, excites me. I love to see the way mushrooms can take substances we think of as toxic, and process them as food, or that dandelions spread not only themselves but their community structure, manifesting their essential qualities (which include healing and detoxifying the human body) to proliferate and thrive in a new environment. The resilience of these life forms is that they evolve while maintaining core practices that ensure their survival. A mushroom is a toxin-transformer, a dandelion is a community of healers waiting to spread… What are we as humans, what is our function in the universe? 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.

We would organize with the perspective that there is wisdom and experience and amazing story in the communities we love, and instead of starting up new ideas/organizations all the time, we would want to listen, support, collaborate, merge, and grow through fusion, not competition.

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 empathetic.

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

Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. 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.

My mentor Grace Lee Boggs first raised the concept of emergence with us in Detroit after reading Margaret Wheatley’s work about biomimicry and mycelium magic.17 Grace started asking us what our movements would look like if we focused on critical connections instead of critical mass. We need each other. I love the idea of shifting from “mile wide inch deep” movements to “inch wide mile deep” movements that schism the existing paradigm.18 Now, I’ve said what emergence is. Strategy is a military term simply meaning a plan of action towards a goal.19

Emergent strategies are ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions. This juxtaposition of emergence and strategy was what made the most sense to me when I was trying to explain the kind of leadership I see in Octavia’s books.

Octavia was concerned with scale—understanding that what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole of society. In many of her books, she shows us how radical ideas spread through conversation, questions, one to one interactions. Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience.

And now I have become obsessed with how we can be movements like flocks of birds, underground power like whispering mushrooms, the seashell representation of a galactic vision for justice—small patterns that avoid useless predation, spread lessons, and proliferate change.

which evolved into strategies for organizers building movements for justice and liberation that leverage relatively simple interactions to create complex patterns, systems, and transformations—including adaptation, interdependence and decentralization, fractal awareness, resilience and transformative justice, nonlinear and iterative change, creating more possibilities.

and now it’s like…ways for humans to practice being in right relationship to our home and each other, to practice complexity, and grow a compelling future together through relatively simple interactions. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

In 1992, Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science, based on her work with organizations and leaders on what is effective, through a lens of quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory. Her key learnings were that: 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.

From her I learned that food is an important foundation for community, and that love isn’t always a doorway to forever…sometimes it is a door to another love. Always it is an emergent process.

has expanded for me over the years as I have come to believe that 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.

“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”30 On the other hand, she said that “Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.” From this wisdom combination, I see that I am charged to write about the revolutions I long for, and that any writing I do, even if it isn’t explicitly political, is still a transformative act.

the organizing model of Ella Baker, the

Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.) Change is constant. (Be like water).34 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. Never a failure, always a lesson.36 Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy).37 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. What you pay attention to grows.

“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

Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” feels incredibly relevant here today: Each new hour holds new chances For new beginnings. Do not be wedded forever To fear, yoked eternally To brutishness. The horizon leans forward, Offering you space to place new steps of change49.

We learned to look for telltale signs that actions were community based. One indicator that things are off is when impacted communities and people of color get involved and they are put in the role of “performing the action,” for example, having their photos taken, being spokespeople, or being asked to endorse or represent work they don’t get to lead, etc., while most of the background organizing is still dominated by the folks who aren’t impacted and won’t be around long term to sustain the campaign or to be held accountable. At its worst, this approach builds up hope and encourages local communities to take risks, and then abandons them with the results. At its best, there is a moment of victory. But too often, in spite of their best intentions, those who aren’t directly impacted only see the surface layer(s) of the impact, and thus come up with surface solutions that don’t address the deep-seated multi-pronged need in the community.

We learned that in organizing and relationships, accountability is key for building a lasting base; when folks see change, they feel their own investment is worthwhile. We need actions that build our base, because we must reach a tipping point of folks who are on the side of justice before we reach the peak of what our planet can provide.

We have also learned that we had to lay out our operating beliefs. Each person has a set of beliefs with which they move through the world. These are formed by their cultural, social, economic, and environmental (amongst others) experiences from birth, and they change as more experiences are added to the whole. A group joins their beliefs together creating a set of named or unnamed ways in which they operate. We have made our beliefs very transparent at Ruckus. What we landed on was that, for the next period of history, we need to place an emphasis on: Impacted leadership (the leadership of communities directly impacted by economic and environmental injustice); Privileged support (the intentional support for impacted leadership from communities/people that can identify their privilege and want to see a rebalancing of power); Feminine leadership (not just women leaders, but leaders who shift our understanding of how power can be held). These beliefs are partly grounded in the reality that leadership from these spheres is directly opposite to the leadership we’ve experienced for the last century and it’s time for balance, and also because the most exciting organizing happening today is coming from communities directly impacted by oppressions and injustices.

section is based on notes I wrote before a keynote panel at the New Economy Coalition’s CommonBound conference in June 2014. My fellow panelists were Gar Alperovitz and Gopal Dayaneni, and we were facilitated by Rachel Plattus. You can see the whole discussion at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0eI9jJRGyk.

In movement work, I have been facilitating groups to shift from a culture of strategic planning to one of strategic intentions—what are our intentions, informed by our vision? What do we need to be and do to bring our vision to pass? How do we bring those intentions to life throughout every change, in every aspect of our work?

This often results in groups centering work that doesn’t depend on factors outside of their control (such as funders, or elections, which come and go and should be well used but not directive or debilitating). The clearer you are as a group about where you’re going, the more you can relax into collaborative innovation around how to get there. You can relax into decentralization, and you want to.

My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration, the way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, dance collectively through the air—to avoid predators, and, it also seems, to pass time in the most beautiful way possible. When fish move in this way, they are shoaling. When bees and other insects move in this way, they are swarming. I love all the words for this activity.

Adaptation Example: How to Facilitate 250 Funders and Organizers56 For the better part of a year, plan a meeting for 110 funders of social and environmental justice. Two days before the meeting, learn that registration has boomed (or not been closed) and the number of participants has doubled. The new numbers are mostly movement partners—organizers, not funders. On Day 1, name these practices, gathered and/or developed over many months for this experiment, to the overflowing room: less prep, more presence low ego, high impact building alignment, not selling ideas relationship is the measure of our strength this will be as amazing as you are trust your own work and each other Have plenary sessions (plenary simply means that everyone is in one room) that inspire people and point towards the work that exemplifies the vision of the meeting. (Be amazed when speakers respect the amount of time they are given and deliver powerful messages in that container.) Have seven planned breakout “labs”—intimate self-guided spaces where participants can deepen relationships and strategy together by working through shared questions and content. To each lab, assign note takers who will feed the content back to the meeting organizers for weaving throughout the meeting. Have an expectation that rebels will create two or three more labs, no matter how much planning and thought goes into selecting the seven labs. Plan for groups of 10–15 people to struggle and deepen together in these labs. Be fl...

believe in the honesty of trees. I, like many organizers, have spent a lot of time processing the notion that anything worth its outcome involves everyone’s priorities, desires, visions and perspectives in every phase and around every decision. I look at the anatomy of trees as one of nature’s examples of successful organizing that realizes that our power is in our ability to both be fiercely centered and grounded but also infinitely reaching towards our unique sources of energy, light, and growth. Each tree’s elements are reliant on one another but totally unique in form and function. There is no competition or pressure to be the root or the trunk or the buds that bloom. Each tree is a universe, a master delegator, a puzzle and a puzzle piece. They have encouraged me to not worry so much about making everyone ‘feel important’ and to focus on how to create systems and support efforts where everyone is important and clear on how their work is unique, crucial and totally interconnected.” —Morgan Mann Willis

Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.

The easier “being wrong” is for you (the faster you can release your viewpoint), the quicker you can adapt to changing circumstances. Adapting allows you to know and name current needs and capacity, to be in relationship in real time, as opposed to any cycle of wishing and/or resenting what others do or don’t give you.

I learned, because there is always the other hand: rock stars get isolated, lose touch with our vulnerability, are expected to pull off superhero work, and generally burn out within a decade. No one has time for rock star tears.

Lifting people up based on personality replicates the dynamics of power and hierarchy that movements claim to be dismantling.

Otherwise we are monsters. We can make missions drift, can get embroiled in inter-organizational or inter-movement beef that does not serve the people, can get into a victim mentality and direct a lot of movement energy towards defending our egos, or get convinced of our superiority. Mostly, we can get too isolated for accountability. If you are in a leadership position, make sure you have a circle of people who can tell you the truth, and to whom you can speak the truth. Bring others into shared leadership with you, and/or collaborate with other formations so you don’t get too enamored of your singular vision.

It’s ok, it happens to everyone. But you can unlearn this behavior! Edge Funders, Resource Generation, and Building Equity and Alignment are three formations working to shift this and other donor/funder malpractice.

“The universe is both orderly and chaotic. We understand it to a point, and then there is mystery. And that is not linear or cumulative. There is no eventual elimination of mystery. There will always be mystery. And knowledge. Humans are both understandable and mysterious. Communion is all about acceptance, and organizing is about both.” —Peter Hardie

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

scale expectations on something long awaited but new; by the learning pains of organizing for depth in the age of social media.

“Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments, flabbergasted to be in each other’s presence.” —Timothy “Speed” Levitch, “Waking Life”

that the broken heart can cover more territory. that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands. that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life. that grief is gratitude. that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community. that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction. that death might be the only freedom. that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time. that your body will feel only as much as it is able to. that the ones you grieve may be grieving you. that the sacred comes from the limitations. that you are excellent at loving.

More precisely, what I felt was the surge of energy I used to get at a march, realizing that there were so many people wanting change, people who had walked completely different pathways to reach the same conclusion that they were willing to give their precious lifeforce to changing the systems of our time.

Let’s spend less time on the imperfection of the process, and more time articulating and crystalizing our lessons.

Everything we attempt, everything we do, is either growing up as its roots go deeper, or it’s decomposing, leaving its lessons in the soil for the next attempt.

There are way too many people in critique mode who belong to no formation, who spend their lives writing volunteer think pieces in 140 character bursts of Internet. It makes me feel defensive of the messy chaotic beauty of transformation. Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once. I

mind that you are somebody in yourself.”69 We are all learning what it means to be somebodies who shape the future, to operate at the scale of transformation.

Transformative Justice: Acknowledges the reality of state harm. Looks for alternative ways to address/interrupt harm, which do not rely on the state. Relies on organic, creative strategies that are community created and sustained. Transforms the root causes of violence, not only the individual experience.