Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

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. So I am open to hearing what doesn’t work about this book, as long as you promise to stay open to what does work.

(r)evolutionary

You can also just like the idea of this book. I often like an idea that I don’t have time or attention to fully engage. I won’t be mad!

One of my favorite questions today is: How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?

The resilience of these life forms is that they evolve while maintaining core practices that ensure their survival.

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

Our generation must walk the spiritual path that is available to us only in this time, with its own unique combination of wisdom and creation. I think there are many ways to find that simple path within ourselves, and I think that those of us who wish to see a truly, radically different world must demand of ourselves the possibility that we are called to lead not from right to left, or from minority to majority, but from spirit towards liberation.

We are constantly impacting and changing our civilization—each other, ourselves, intimates, strangers.

Are we? Who is?

I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.

As Toni Cade Bambara has taught us, we must make just and liberated futures irresistible.

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.

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.

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. Wheatley

ill and I now have a work soulmateship—they are family, a chosen sibling, an idea confidante.

I suspect that to really transform our society, we will need to make justice one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have.

What we pay attention to grows—this

Detroit musician/spiritual teacher/friend Sterling Toles told me he considers himself a “dressing room where people can try on their most authentic selves,” and this has been a guiding visual for me when I am engaged in my healing work.

If we accept the scientific and science fictional premise that change is a constant condition of this universe, then it becomes important that we learn to be in right relationship with change.

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

Move at the speed of trust.38 Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships.

What you pay attention to grows.

Its wave nature gives this measurement a curious property: the more certain we are about either speed or position, the more uncertain we become about the other. Uncertainty/doubt. Valuing both process and outcome.

One of the ways I was able to identify these was by formulating my critique of the ways that social justice movements have felt, and where my longing for something else was strongest.

every crisis is an opportunity, which is amazing theoretically, and requires great emotional fortitude in practice, as well as the maturity to understand that the negative realization of that theory is “disaster capitalism.”39

recovery rather than a discovery.

“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

We are still mostly misdirected, turned away from the wisdom that is our inheritance. Joanna Macy speaks of the “great turning,” a collective awakening and shifting direction, away from the wanton destruction of this planet and each other, away from those practices of separation and competition listed above, towards life and abundance.40 I like this visual of turning and evolving, as opposed to destroying the systems in place now.

How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale.

This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.

Or using the Internet and cellular data to build trust and connection,

Yes, resist the onslaught of oppression, but measure our success not just by what we stop, but by how many of us feel, and can say:

Octavia Butler said, “Belief initiates and guides action—Or it does nothing.”

Compelling futures have to have more justice, yes; and right relationship to planet, yes; but also must allow for our growth and innovation.

Change is coming—what do we need to imagine as we prepare for it? What is compelling about surviving climate change? What is a just transition economy?48 What is an economy for the phase of transition from this way of relating to Earth and resources, to the way we might relate on a watered Earth, or a frozen Earth?

How do we resource the local and still honor our nomadic tendency, our natural migration patterns (which we deny by trying to stay in only one place), our global interconnectedness?

ideas that come from, and work for, more people.

Detroit filmmaker Oya Amakisi once shared with me the words of General Baker, a Detroit labor organizer and leader, who said, “You keep asking how do we get the people here? I say, what will we do when they get here?”

In a successful Ruckus action, the visions and solutions are deeper and more compelling than the injustice.

I have been using this mandate in my work for Black liberation (http://southernersonnewground.org/2016/07/themandate/).

How we live and grow and stay purposeful in the face of constant change actually does determine both the quality of our lives, and the impact that we can have when we move into action together.

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.

There is a deep trust in this: to lift because the birds around you are lifting,

The sooner I can look for the opportunity, the blessing, the more efficient I am in moving towards my vision.

How often, how quickly can I become aware of the miraculous nature of the moment I am in, and adapt towards the pleasure available in that awareness?

It is useful to classify the economic and ecological disruptions that make up this “new normal” of instability into two groups: shocks and slides.

We believe that shifts can emerge from collective “aha” moments when social movements awaken the popular imagination

Shifts also result from well-organized communities creating new institutions that meet peoples’ needs as responses to the shocks and slides better than the dominant systems can, such as food sovereignty projects, collectivized housing systems, cooperative economics (time banks, worker co-ops, food shares, community-based restorative justice projects, etc.).

instead of introductions at the beginning, which no one will remember, have participants say their names as they speak in the room.

And you can’t bring down a hundred oak trees bound beneath the soil!