Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

“This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real.” —Ella Baker

how important emergent strategy, strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions,

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”

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

who get spun into wonder about the natural world and want to know things, who feel and know more than we can say or explain, and want to know how knowing those things can transform the ways we approach changing the world.

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

I am open to critiques of course, if they are offered in the spirit of collective liberation.

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.

“Exercise your human mind as fully as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag.” —Ryan Power, Waking Life

We are brilliant at survival, but brutal at it. We tend to slip out of togetherness the way we slip out of the womb, bloody and messy and surprised to be alone. And clever—able to learn with our whole bodies the ways of this world.

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

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.

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.

everyone is my teacher.

“You weren’t starving before you got here. You were born full.” —Chani Nicholas

“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions”—I will repeat these words from Nick Obolenksy throughout this book because they are the clearest articulation of emergence that I have come across.

Dandelions don’t know whether they are a weed or a brilliance. But each seed can create a field of dandelions. We are invited to be that prolific. And to return fertility to the soil around us.

Cells may not know civilization is possible. They don’t amass as many units as they can sign up to be the same. No—they grow until they split, complexify. Then they interact and intersect and discover their purpose—I am a lung cell! I am a tongue cell!—and they serve it. And they die. And what emerges from these cycles are complex organisms, systems, movements, societies.

Nothing is wasted, or a failure. Emergence is a system that makes use of everything in the itera...

Octavia Butler said, “civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.”10 She also said “all that you touch you change / all that you change, changes you.”

Now, I’ve said what emergence is. Strategy is a military term simply meaning a plan of action towards a goal.

Emergent strategies are ways for humans to practice complexity and grow the future through relatively simple interactions.

Humans? Some of us are surviving, following, flocking—but some of us are trying to imagine where we are going as we fly. That is radical imagination.

Right now there is an organization called Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), which is cultivating a safe space for Black leaders to practice being vulnerable, being in mutual support, with a goal of countering the usual model of leader isolation.

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.

Emergent Strategy: was, initially, a way of describing the adaptive and relational leadership model found in the work of Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler (and others). then it grew into plans of action, personal practices and collective organizing tools that account for constant change and rely on the strength of relationship for adaptation. With a crush on biomimicry and permaculture.

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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. and maybe, if I’m honest, it’s a philosophy for how to be in harmony and love, in and with the world.

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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.

Grace taught me dialectical humanism—the cycle of collective transformation of beliefs that occurs as we gather new information and experiences, meaning that, over time, we can understand and hold a position we previously believed to be wrong.

At its most fundamental, facilitation is the art of making things easy, making it easier for humans to work together and get things done.

“There is a difference between ‘simple’ and ‘easy.’ Simple as in the ‘relatively simple interactions’ of emergence, easy as in ‘facilitation is the art of making things easy.’ I don’t think they are the same, and I have a hunch the difference might be important and that maybe it should be explicit. Simple means that it boils down to relationships between individual people, objects, beings, truths. Ease has more to do with the amount of friction (or understanding) between the peopleobjectsbeingstruths. And part of what can clear a path to making things easier is to name the simple interactions at play in a complex system.” —Rachel Plattus

Among other things, love is an energy of possibility: the possibility of wholeness, in a Platonic understanding. I come from a lineage of brave and radical love, and I don’t think it is an accident that love has been such an overt and active force in my life and that I have come to the conclusion that there is a science of love, a science of transformation and acceptance and gratitude that can help us to be better humans. So I will draw on that love experience as data as much as any other data presented in this book.

Life and death are transitions that want to be held gently.

Toni Cade Bambara, a Black feminist writer-organizer who left lots of wisdom for us, said two things that I turn to when I start to wonder if art is enough of a contribution. On one hand, as I referenced earlier, she said “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.

I have also been impressed and developed by the speeches of biomimicry teacher Janine Benyus, the mycelium/mushroom scholar Paul Stametz, the organizing model of Ella Baker, the Toltec worldview presented in The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, and the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (particularly the interpretations of Stephen Mitchell and Le Guin).

“Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.” —Octavia Butler33

I learned woe from the artist/rapper Drake, and I am deeply grateful for it. Actually, I owe gratitude to the Toronto rapper and producer Devontée who uses it to refer to his crew—who are always “working on excellence.” It passed from him to fellow Canadian rapper Drake before I picked up on it. I use this term all the time and thank these men profusely.

Harm Reduction is an approach to policy and care that reduces the harm that comes from drugs, alcohol, sex and sex work, and other legal and illegal human behaviors. For a good introduction, visit http://harmreduction.org/about-us/principles-of-harm-reduction/

“People are constantly creating what we call ‘maroon spaces’—free communities, free platforms for thought and expression. I think that that’s just in the DNA of Black Atlantic culture.… There’s always the imperative towards the emancipated space.”—Greg Tate, from an interview with Giovanni Russonello, April 30, 2015, http://www .capitalbop.com/greg-tate-on-burnt-sugar-afrofuturism-and-the- maroon-spaces-that-music-allows/.

In the study and practice of emergent strategy, there are core principles that have emerged and that guide me in learning and using this idea and method in the world. I gather them here with the expectation that they will grow. 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.

Complex Movements is also studying the relationship between emergence and movements for social justice. Their emblem system is a gorgeous way of learning properties of nature we can apply to our work. Mycelium is the part of the fungus that grows underground in thread-like formations. It connects roots to one another and breaks down plant material to create healthier ecosystems. Mycelium is the largest organism on earth. Interconnectedness. Remediation. Detoxification. Ants. Ant societies function through individual ants acting collectively in accord with simple, local information to carry on all of their survival activities. Every ant relies on the work of others in producing their own work. Cooperative work. Collective Sustainability. Ferns are a form of fractal. A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self similarity, which means it looks roughly the same at any scale. Small-scale solutions impact the whole system. Use similar principles to build at all scales. The Wavicle, or wave-particle duality, suggests that all objects exhibit both wave and partical properties. Between observations as it evolves on its own, it behaves like a wave; distributed across space, exploring different intermixing paths to all possible destinations. However, when its location or speed is measured, it appears definite and concrete, like a particle. Its wave nature gives this measurement a curious property: the more certain we are about either speed or position, the more uncertain we...

This is an inversion of the quote “If you don’t trust the people, they become untrustworthy,” from Stephen Mitchell’s translation, Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (New York: HarperCollins, 1988).

“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 learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness.

We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together.

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.

So, without further ado, the elements: Element Nature of Element Fractal The Relationship Between Small and Large Adaptative How We Change Interdependence and Decentralization Who We Are and How We Share Non-linear and Iterative The Pace and Pathways of Change Resilience and Transformative Justice How We Recover and Transform Creating More Possibilities How We Move Towards Life

How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale.