Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Brag and Swag Wall At the beginning of a gathering of people after some time apart—particularly in an alliance or network setting, particularly if it’s a regular meeting (annual, biannual), do a Brag and Swag Wall. The Brag Wall can be filled up with post-it notes from the people in the room. It should include good news and celebrations related to the work that has brought everyone together. This should also include lessons (things that could be interpreted as failures, but are lessons for the group). In my experience the most successful walls also include major personal achievements like falling in love, or a transformative breakup, or a graduation. Looks like this: Name Location/Organization Achievement Links for more information (if relevant, available) The Swag Wall can include anything the people and groups in the room created related to the central work of the gathering—t-shirts, banners, flyers, reports. So often we are doing important local work and we come together and try to share it all in words. It helps to see the ways we are speaking to our communities, the beautiful things we create. This can be done in a half hour to two hours. As always, more time allows more stories, more depth. This can create real intimacy in a group if people are encouraged to share more than just pitches about their greatness, but share lessons. To get really fancy, have a wall that runs the length of the space you are in and have a past, present, and future section. Let the Brag and ...

Organizational Alignment with Vision The vision should be a north star for an organization or group, not as a destination, but as a way of being in the world. Whatever future we have articulated that we want to create, we have to practice it in as many aspects of our current life and work as possible. This brings our vision to life. A great way to assess this is to look at how the vision shows up in various aspects of the work. How does your collective vision show up in: how you hire? how you fire or transition staff? how you handle grievances and conflict? how and where you raise funds? how you handle budgeting the work (is it sustainable, abundant?)? how you make decisions (is this how you envision decisions being made? What do you need to be practicing?)? how you provide benefits and how empowered the group feels using them?

Conflict is natural between any two people. We all come from different life/family/world experiences—so even when we love each other, even when we are building movement together, we will have different opinions, different ideas on what is right. Here are some conversations that help clarify approaches to conflict and difference:

The “beef” is not always about the content that is initially brought up. The majority of mediations I have facilitated have come down to the ways people are communicating, and/or to people or organizations that feel unseen, unheard, or undervalued.

Don’t make assumptions. Don’t take things personally. Be impeccable with your word. Always do your best.

“The essence of dialectical thinking is the ability to be self-critical. Being able to see that an idea you had or an activity you had engaged in which was correct at one stage can turn into its opposite at another stage; that whenever a person or an organization or a country is in crisis, it is necessary to look at your own concepts and be critical of them because they may have turned into traps.” —Grace Lee Boggs

100 www.ejnet.org/ej/workingtogether.pdf. 101 To find the full protocol and principles for BASAT, visit baysolidarity .wordpress.com.

To find the full protocol and principles for A4BL, visit: a4bl.wordpress .com. 103 Learned from Cinna, at Extreme Energy Extraction Summit, a twice yearly gathering of communities resisting extreme energy extraction around the globe. 104 I learned these tools from Autumn Meghan Brown, whose work can be found at www.iambrown.org. She is also interviewed on consensus and other things earlier in this book. 105 When getting started with this method, or if working with a large group, I recommend using a system called fist-five for voting, where people use their hands or call out a number from zero to five to indicate their level of agreement with the proposal. Anything less than a five calls for some discussion, and you move a proposal forward if the participants are all above a three, or above a four, depending on the nature of your group. See additional resources for this in the documents accompanying this book at alliedmedia.esii. 106 This person should figure out work they can do solo that contributes to the movement :) 107 “Get thee behind me Satan!” 108 You can find additional resources and visuals for consensus decision making at http://i.imgur.com/FEEpW.png. 109 You can book workshops at https://www.alliedmedia.org/octavias-brood/booking. 110 You imagine yourself in the future (set a date that people can imagine—twenty years out, say), walking to work, and you see a newspaper. You pick it up and the headline is celebrating the work of your organization/group/movement. R...

You can read the full vision at alliedmedia.org/esii. 112 Throughout this book, I touch on shared work management systems that liberate the information about where tasks are in organizations. See especially the “Tools for Emergent Strategy Facilitation” chapter in the section “Tools for Increasing Interdependence and Decentralization.” 113 Learn more about the work of the Detroit Narrative Agency at https://www.alliedmedia.org/dna. 114 Arthur Fry co-invented the Post-it Note. 115 Cindy is one of the most dynamic organizers of our time. Her work is primarily around climate—she

works at Grassroots Global Justice, is part of the Climate Justice Alliance—and I had the opportunity to work with her on the second US Social Forum in 2010. 116 Loretta is one of the co-founders of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and one of the creators of the term “reproductive justice.” This quote is from an interview in The F-Word 3: A Feminist Handbook for the Revolution (Outlaw Issue) (Oakland: PM Press, 2008). 117 Boggs, Living for Change. 118 Here is my favorite write-up of the tool, from Social Transformation Project: http://www.stproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/darci -accountability-grid.pdf. 119 See the section in this book entitled “Efficient Consensus Decision Making” for more on this. 120 See “Emergent/Collective Agenda Development” above for details on Emergent Session Generation. 121 The World Café model works really well for harvesting. World Café involves setting up a series of small conversations that a group can cycle through, getting to build understanding through intimate conversations. Learn more at http://www.theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method/. 122 This incredible wisdom comes from Liu Hoi-man, generative somatics teacher and gifted healer. 123 You can book workshops through https://www.alliedmedia.org/octavias-brood/booking. 124 See “Agenda Templates.”

“We the unappeased, the unaccepting continued looking, filling in the silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. Driven forward by the fact that no matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible. And, given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one.” —Steve Fitch, Waking Life

Soundtrack Anohni, Hopelessness Beyoncé, Lemonade Bon Iver Chance the Rapper, Coloring Book Fetty Wap Frank Ocean, Endless/Blonde Gallant, Ology and “Blue Bucket of Gold” Gwen Stefani, “Make Me Like You” Hamilton: The Musical James Blake, The Colour of Anything Jazz Singer playlist featuring Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Etta James, Sarah Vaughn, and Edith Pilaf Jenifer Lewis, Roz Ryan, Brandy, “Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That” Kanye West, The Life of Pablo Moses Sumney Nao, “Adore You,” “Like Velvet” Prince Rihanna, Anti Deluxe Sam Dew, “Desperately” Savages, “Adore” Snoh Aalegra, “Emotional” Solange, A Seat at the Table St. Lucia, “Closer Than This” 125 There is another book’s worth of additional content, reflections, conversation, and tools there related to emergent strategy. Check it out at alliedmedia.org/esii. Thank