Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Here are a few signs that you may be in an abusive movement, work, family, friendship, or romantic dynamic: you make agreements or set boundaries and they get crossed or broken, and/or you can’t hold the agreements/boundaries yourself. you can’t communicate directly with the person/people about issues or concerns (culture of gossip usually grows here, in the family, office, group). when you raise the issue that agreements or boundaries are not being held, there is no accountability (the other person or people deny the transgression, say they forgot the agreements, say it is your fault, ridicule you, continue the transgression—and/or you can’t see your accountability in boundary crossing, and/or diminish the harm). there is a culture of blaming or dishonesty that breaks down trust over time. you don’t feel comfortable processing the issues of the dynamic with friends, coworkers, allies (you feel ashamed, or like it will upset the other person/people in the dynamic). arguments are really confusing and/or repetitive—you can’t tell what you are arguing about, the arguments have no boundaries or containers, you keep returning to issues you felt were resolved, or you keep losing track of your own values and center in the process. you feel dismissed, hidden, or disrespected, and/or like you can’t acknowledge reality, be transparent, or respectful. you feel like a core part of yourself is compromised or not welcome, and/or you want to change a core aspect of another person or grou...

Radical honesty. No omissions, no white lies, no projections. Ask the questions you really want answered, speak your truth, and let the relationship build inside all that reality. Just a note from experience, the small lies can be the hardest to stop telling. “No I don’t want to get on the phone right now, can we just text?”; “I’m busy catching up on my reality TV show”; “Real cow milk ice cream”; or “I know I said I didn’t want to ___, but now I do.” However, the more you practice this, the more you will find yourself spending your waking hours in the ways you want to, the ways that honor the miracle of your existence, which was not given to you to waste in polite avoidance of hurting people’s feelings. You will find that you can be honest and kind, you can be honest and compassionate.

Acknowledge the dynamics, then keep growing. Have an understanding on the front end of the race, class, gender, ability, geographic, and other power dynamics that exist between you. And also remember that these are constructs. Be in the complexity of living inside these constructs while evolving beyond them through relationship. Relinquish Frankenstein. You are not creating people to be with, or work with, some idealized individuals made of perfect parts of personality that you discovered on your life journey. You are meeting individuals with their own full lives behind and ahead of them. Stop trying to make and fix others, and instead be curious about what they have made of themselves.

As you grow this skill, bring it to work, to family, to love. I have found that I now spend immensely less time managing the truth for others, and have people around me who want and encourage the real me to show up. In the practices section check out “Coevolution Through Friendship and Woes.”

Simultaneously I’ve watched several public takedowns, call-outs, and other grievances take place on social and mainstream media. Some of those have been of strangers, but recently I’ve had the experience of seeing people I know and love targeted and taken down. In most cases, very complex realities get watered down into one flawed aspect of these people’s personalities, or one mistake or misunderstanding. A mob mentality takes over then, an evisceration of character that is punitive, traumatizing, and isolating. This has happened with increasing frequency over the past year, such that I’m wondering if those of us with an intention of transforming the world have a common understanding of the kind of justice we want to practice, now and in the future. What we do now is find out someone or some group has done (or may have done) something out of alignment with our values. Some of the transgressions are small—saying something fucked-up, being disrespectful in a group process. Some are massive—false identity, sexual assault. We then tear that person or group to shreds in a way that affirms our values. We create memes, reducing someone to the laughingstock of the Internet that day. We write think-pieces on how we are not like that person, and obviously wouldn’t make the same mistakes they have made. We deconstruct them as thinkers, activists, groups, bodies, partners, parents, children—finding all of the contradictions and limitations and shining bright light on them. When we are...

But lately, as the attacks grow faster and more vicious, I wonder: is this what we’re here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values? What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy, complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left beside us?

How do I hold a systemic analysis and approach when each system I am critical of is peopled, in part, by the same flawed and complex individuals that I love? This question always leads me to self-reflection. If I can see the ways I am perpetuating systemic oppressions, if I can see where I learned the behavior and how hard it is to unlearn it, I start to have more humility as I see the messiness of the communities I am part of, the world I live in.

In my mediations, “Why?” is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That’s because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetrating against us. “Why?” often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, often undiagnosed mental illnesses like depression or bipolar disorder, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. Also, “Why?” makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances. We don’t want to see that. Demonizing is more efficient than relinquishing our world views, which is why we have slavery, holocausts, lynchings, and witch trials in our short human history.

Again, there are times when that kind of calling out is the only option—particularly in relation to those of great privilege who are not within our reach. But if you have each other’s phone numbers, or are within two degrees of social-media connection, and particularly if you are in the small, small percentage of humans trying to change the world—you actually have access to transformative justice in real time. Get mediation support, think of the community, move toward justice. Real time is slower than social-media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility. Real-time transformation requires stating your needs and setting functional boundaries. Transformative justice requires us, at minimum, to ask ourselves questions like these before we jump, teeth bared, for the jugular. I think this is some of the hardest work. It’s not about pack hunting an external enemy, it’s about deep shifts in our own ways of being. But if we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren’t the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species. And so much more.

I want us to do better. I want to feel like we are responsible for each other’s transformation. Not the transformation from vibrant flawed humans to bits of ash, but rather the transformation from broken people and communities to whole ones. I believe transformative justice could yield deeper trust, resilience, and interdependence. All these mass and intimate punishments keep us small and fragile. And right now our movements and the people within them need to be massive and complex and strong. I want to hear what y’all think, and what you’re practicing in the spirit of transformative justice. Towards wholeness and evolution, loves.

“I am a priest of Yemoja—the ocean is sacred to me. It’s my place of worship, of home, of grounding. If I am drowning in my own stuff, because of the relationship I have with Yemoja, she reminds me that my salvation is in moving the way she moves. The ocean doesn’t stop moving—it moves in different ways, with different levels of intensity—Coney Island looks one way, the Indian Ocean moves another more ferocious way, it’s still all the ocean. Yemoja reminds me to not get caught up with this external calendar of production, or get caught up with the idea that visibility is the same as doing the work. When I am flowing and can hear that small but powerful voice say ‘yes,’ I feel a complete sense of calm, I know I am heading in the right direction.” —Joan Morgan

The word “strategy” is a military term, which means a plan of action towards a goal. I want to really emphasize the “a”s in that sentence—there is a practice of narrowing down, identifying one path forward, one strategy, one way, one agenda, one leader, one set of values, etc. Reducing the wild and wonderful world into one thing that we can grasp, handle, hold onto, and advance. We do this in movement all the time. I have been in countless meetings where there was a moment of creative abundance and energy, and then someone said we needed to pick one thing to get behind, or a three- or five- or ten-point plan. What came next was sometimes very compelling and visionary. Other times—often times—it was reductionist, agreeing on the lowest common denominator, the least exciting thing, because that was the only place there was unity. There was often a general sense of dissatisfaction and collective shrugging into this unity that was not invigorating. Authentic, exciting unity takes time, and lots of experimenting.

isn’t that we never need sharp, directed, focused and even single-issue moments—we absolutely do. It’s just that we live in a system that thrives when conditions are abundant and diverse, in a universe that holds contradictions and multitudes, and we often reject that chaotic fertile reality too soon, as if we can’t tolerate the scale of our own collective brilliance.

Meaningful collaboration both relies on and deepens relationship—the stronger the bond between the people or groups in collaboration, the more possibility you can hold. In beginning this work, notice who you feel drawn to, and where you find ease. And notice who challenges you, who makes the edges of your ideas grow or fortify. I find that my best work has happened during my most challenging collaborations, because there are actual differences that are converging and creating more space, ways forward that serve more than one worldview.

Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.

One of her core questions was, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” My answer to that question has become, “Time to close the gap between vision and practice. Time for those of us who seek justice and liberation to BE just and liberated, to be of this place fully.”

“I love trees. big ass trees. trees weather all storms cuz they’re rooted. my organizing needs to be rooted. rooted in my principles, rooted in the love for the people, rooted in community and a vision that extends to the skies like big ass redwoods.” —Hiram Rivera

A group that is always making decisions isn’t a group that is always learning, necessarily, but learning is an essential function of making good decisions. And in order to learn together you have to be good at humility and curiosity.

I’m not interested in “convincing” people, who have no motivation and little interest in sharing power, to do so. I am much more interested in contending for power. There is a huge opportunity in Canada to invest in women of color leaders. To support them to build the power of their community organizations, to build a base that can eventually elect them to political office and hold them accountable. My dream is to support the development of a network of women of color leaders who move into positions of power and organize those institutions to work for their communities. I think if we did this well we could

My experience being pregnant: acceptance. The four noble truths—there is suffering. Clinging is the cause of suffering. There is an end to suffering. There is a way out—the noble eightfold path. My pregnancy is a process of letting go… Clinging to anything, to fixed ideas of how things should be, how things are supposed to go, doesn’t work. I have had other lessons that showed me that, but this is a really focused way to learn. To be ok with uncertainty, not knowing anything, not knowing what the next day will be like, or next few months, the process of birth, what this person will be like, what their arrival on this plane will be like. There have been times when I am moving through uncertainty in the past few years, where my practice has helped me be ok with that, to not feel like I deserve to know, that none of us are promised that clarity. You’re not all that in charge.

Individual: Interview three people you trust in your extended community to give you feedback about how you show up in the world. Share you purpose/intention with each of them and ask them to hold that as they answer your questions. Sample questions: What is my impact in the world? In three words, what am I embodying? Where do you think I could grow?

Organizational: Interview three people in the community your group/organization serves to give you feedback based on how y’all show up in the world. Share with them what you think you are embodying and have a brief discussion on how much you are or are not embodying that. Can everyone in the organization state the vision and mission accurately, even passionately?

How do I/we respond to positive changes? How do I/we respond to negative changes? What is my/our intention? How do I/we do at keeping my/our intention present during changes?

Assessment of Interdependence and Decentralization Who do you lean on? Who leans on you? (Explore the places where those lists overlap, and where they don’t. How can you increase mutual relationship?) Are all of your needs met? If yes, how? If not, why not? Did you answer either question above as if it’s all your responsibility? If not, try it. How does that feel? If yes, answer again as if nothing happens with you alone. Who makes work happen in your group? Me! A small core group of us Everyone shares the work Does everyone take vacation time and weekends where you work? Do you feel comfortable using the sick and/or vacation time you earn? If you disappeared tomorrow (because aliens chose you as the ambassador from Earth to the Alliance of Evolved Planets, for instance), how would your organization respond? Close its doors

We spend our lives in unconscious practices, practices that make us deny our true selves, our true power, our collectivism. It takes three hundred repetitions for muscle memory and three thousand repetitions for embodiment.89 What do you need to practice?

What does your organization/collective/alliance practice? (Include all the things you practice in your collective work—conflict avoidance, glorifying burnout, over scheduling, mission drifting, check-ins, retreats, active listening, community accountability, etc.) What do you need to practice?

Vulnerable reflection. We reach out to each other and say things like “something incredible is happening,” “I don’t know,” “I fucked up,” “I think I hurt someone,” “I’m overwhelmed,” “I’m terrified,” “I think I’m hurting,” “I’m lost,” “Am I falling in/out of love?,” “_____ happened, what should I do?,” “I want to do something new/different/marvelous/dangerous/that feels essential to my soul—help!,” and so on. We ask others to be mirrors for us at our most vulnerable places, so we can see what we are learning, see new possibilities in our lives.

Sometimes what is happening in the world is so terrifying and urgent that we forget our complexity, or wonder why we would spend time on ourselves or take time for our friendships when there is so much external work to do. What I am noticing is that it is not a privilege to practice coevolution through friendship—it is the deepest work. I believe it is how communities have survived. I believe it is Harriet Tubman going back to free others, because it wasn’t enough to free only herself. I believe it is Ubuntu91 active in my life. I believe it is the freedom that we are longing for, which will never be given to us, which we have to create, the pulsing life force of the collective body we are birthing, the rhythm of a shared heart.

We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist. And visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together.92

Some of my favorites for meditation are: “The Prison Cell,” Mahmoud Darwish; “The Journey,” Mary Oliver; “Yes, We Can Talk,” Mark Nepo; and everything from June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Warsaw Shire, or Nayirrah Waheed.

The goal can be relationship building—this is often the most necessary piece of work in terms of strengthening a group’s resilience and capacity to move together. “Don’t thingify,” Taj offered me recently, when I was in a moment of pressure to produce “outcomes” at a large gathering. “Humanify! Shifting our way of being is our tangible outcome. Systems change comes from big groups making big shifts in being.”

2. Invite the right people. We invite people to meetings for a lot of the wrong reasons—obligation, guilt, representation…even love. The questions to ask when shaping the invitation list are: “Who is directly impacted by this issue?”; “Who is doing compelling work on this issue?”; and “Who can move this work forward?”

Inviting the right people means we aren’t wasting time by renegotiating the goals nonstop throughout the meeting and/or managing the dissonance that occurs (righteously in my opinion) when a participant, who shouldn’t be at the meeting, tries to make it worth their time by derailing the process of advancing the stated goals.

In any conversation—and I would say in any moment in life—there is a next elegant step—one that is possible and strategic based on who is taking it and where they are trying to go. Find it and you cannot fail.

We articulate these shared principles here, to the best of our ability, so that we can all more clearly understand the work we are doing together… We are making an honest attempt to solve the most significant problems of our day. We are building a network of people and organizations that are developing long-term solutions based on the immediate confrontation of our most pressing problems. Wherever there is a problem, there are already people acting on the problem in some fashion. Understanding those actions is the starting point for developing effective strategies to resolve the problem, so we focus on the solutions, not the problems. We emphasize our own power and legitimacy. We presume our power, not our powerlessness. We are agents, not victims. We spend more time building than attacking. We focus on strategies rather than issues. The strongest solutions happen through the process, not in a moment at the end of the process. The most effective strategies for us are the ones that work in situations of scarce resources and intersecting systems of oppression because those solutions tend to be the most holistic and sustainable. Place is important. For the AMC, Detroit is important as a source of innovative, collaborative, low-resource solutions. Detroit gives the conference a sense of place, just as each of the conference participants bring their own sense of place with them to the conference. We encourage people to engage with their whole selves, not just with one part of t...

held accountable for our mistakes than forgiven our inaction. Group Agreements At the beginning of a meeting of people who don’t work together regularly, it helps to set some agreements in place. If people are working together regularly, just have some standing agreements. Here are some of my favorites for emergent spaces: Listen from the inside out, or listen from the bottom up (a feeling in your gut matters!); Engage Tension, Don’t Indulge Drama; W.A.I.T.—Why Am I Talking? Make Space, Take Space—a post-ableist adaptation of step up, step back to help balance the verbose and the reticent;103 Confidentiality—take the lessons, leave the details; Be open to learning; Be open to someone else speaking your truth; Building, not selling—when you speak, converse, don’t pitch; Yes/and, both/and; Value the process as much as, if not more than, you value the outcomes; Assume best intent, attend to impact;

Self care and community care—pay attention to your bladder, pay attention to your neighbors.

The vision of an organization is the furthest it can see. It is looking into the future, dreaming together, predicting impact, flexing the imagination muscle, and saying aloud what we long for. I cannot overstate this—the more people who deeply share a vision, the more possible that vision becomes. Build the vision across your group. When new people come in, make sure they are already deeply aligned with the vision (they could easily say “This is MY vision”), or take the time to orient and

align. If you bring on a number of new people, it may mean revisiting the vision. I recommend an annual check in on the vision—is this still the furthest we can see?

What do you need to do or be great at to embody your vision as you fulfill your mission? Brainstorm a huge list of things, go nuts. Cluster those things. You might have sustainability things, or stuff related to conflict resolution, community leadership, decision making, financial management or fundraising, visibility and communications, or totally other stuff. Clustering helps you get a first glance at what is showing up. Now prioritize the clusters. The biggest clusters may not be the most necessary, just the most obvious. You want to be intentional as a group,

Prioritize for what I call the “first domino” cluster, the thing that, if you achieve it, will begin to move the whole pattern.

For the Detroit Narrative Agency, a project dedicated to shifting the common narratives about Detroit away from “blank slate/canvas” and “violent crime city” to “popular resistance against injustice” and “resilient long-lasting communities,” with the understanding that the future of a place follows the stories we tell about that place.113 As we have moved through the work we keep asking ourselves, “What is the narrative being uplifted here? And who is sharing that narrative?”

Before developing the agenda at all, I work with as many people in the group as I can access in order to get a solid grasp on the goals/intentions for the meeting. Often the agenda gets disrupted because there are divergent intentions in the room, and not enough space provided for alignment work. So getting clear on the shared intentions (often called goals) and places (or hot spots, turbulence, bumps, landmines, or other explosive words depending on the setting) where we can expect discussion will be needed for alignment.

A lot of conflict and discontent in organizations comes because we don’t build in time and space for this digestion—to really understand each other across difference, to understand ideas and opinions that are not our own, to move past the initial knee-jerk reaction, shaped by our unique socialization and experience, and into reflection.

four annual advances. (Calling them “retreats” when they are work sessions is disingenuous. Plan retreats too! Just don’t confuse them.) One can focus on reflection and evaluation; one can focus on applying lessons from reflection to the next period of time (planning); and one can be about big vision, meta discussions of the work, the field, the patterns emerging, skill development. Looking back, looking ahead, looking up and down.

This one seems so simple and old school, but having community to learn with is actually really crucial for human development. It means we learn to see ideas, not just through our own singular and limited perspectives, but to see how different experiences create different ways of thinking about things, of comprehending and applying ideas. Loretta Ross teaches us that, “When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement.”116 Studying together with a respect for our ecosystem of ideas is movement. I love to innovate in isolation, but when I try to exert those isolated concepts on others, I can become oppressive and controlling pretty quickly. Luckily I have good people around me who attend to or ignore me appropriately until I grow my ideas with others.

DARCI is a grid that allows you to organize the decisions in your group, organization, network or alliance, clarifying the Decider/Delegator, and who is Accountable, Responsible, Consulted, and Informed about decisions. DARCI is the ultimate “play your position” tool. I have seen many, many versions of the DARCI tool, which was originally developed by organizational/leadership teacher Robert Gass. And dear lord it helps make things so much clearer in any group!

Example 1: A Staff Meeting Agenda Check-ins Scheduling Updates Financial updates (budget, fundraising, etc.) Important Programmatic Content: news on prior decisions (brief updates of relevant news related to past decisions) conversation on current decisions (discussions of content that isn’t ready for a decision yet) decision time119 (decisions on things that have been discussed and proposed) Clarifying next steps, assignments, and deadlines Closing with gratitude/appreciation

Example 2: Emergent Strategy Based Gathering Agenda120 Welcome (honor the Land, the place, the people) Introductions Overview of Goals, Agenda, Agreements Framing plenary: Why Us, Here, Now? Emergent Session Generation (generate ideas for sessions, organize by priority and interest) Emergent Sessions, 1 (vote with feet, ID facilitator and note taker) Emergent Sessions, 2 (for each subsequent session have a quick review for extended sessions, merged sessions, new sessions or other adaptations) Emergent Sessions, 3 Harvesting121 Making Meaning/Closing Plenary Closing with appreciations to each other and to the Land (Add more plenaries or emergent sessions as time permits, as well as game night, no/mo’ talent show, local tours and other relationship-deepening activities)

Transparency about who is doing what work helps the group relax. And “a relaxed body is the most powerful body.”122 The more mysterious the work is, the less resilient the group is.