Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

measure our success not just by what we stop, but by how many of us feel, and can say: I am living a life I don’t regret A life that will resonate with my ancestors,41 and with as many generations forward as I can imagine. I am attending to the crises of my time with my best self, I am of communities that are doing our collective best to honor our ancestors and all humans to come.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” —Albert Camus

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

This is why Gar Alperovitz’s writing speaks to me—what’s between capitalism and socialism?

This is why Gopal Dayaneni’s work appeals to me—what are the strategies we need to learn, with appropriate fear and wonder, to move our movements into right relationship with the planet?

What is compelling about surviving climate change?

How do we prepare the children in our lives to be visionary, and to love nature even when the changes are frightening and incomprehensible?

How do we cultivate the muscle of radical imagination needed to dream together beyond fear? Showing Black and white people sitting at a lunch counter together was science fiction.

When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal. Fractals—a way to speak of the patterns we see—move from the micro to macro level. The same spirals on sea shells can be found in the shape of galaxies. We must create patterns that cycle upwards.

(We each hold contradictions—my shellac nails vs. my desire that no one do the toxic work of nail painting, my family travel vs. my desire not to use fossil fuels, etc.).

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.

“Transform yourself to transform the world.”—Grace Lee Boggs.

“Nature has taught me that if humans don’t figure out what revolution really means, nature will make the revolution despite us.” —Tawana Petty

One good strong wordless yell that filled up the car and released the tension that had been building between my mind and my gut. This is something I have been working on, engaging my anger and actually releasing it in harmless ways when it’s live in me.

Then I had the thought that often shifts my mood: this is all the miracle.

One of our key roles, as social movements, must be to harness the shocks and direct the slides—all towards achieving the systemic, cultural and psychic shifts we need to navigate the changes with the greatest equity, resilience and ecological restoration possible.

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

invite everyone to be facilitative: keep returning to questions, notice who isn’t speaking, let others speak your truth.

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

all change is not systems change or even political change. sometimes positive change upholds the status quo. we are not here to feel good all the time, but to do good.

remind participants that change happens at a pace relevant for the people involved—we are not ahead of or behind each other, we are in a million experiments.

relax under pressure! there is no form of freaking out that will make this job less challenging.

Instead of digging its roots deep and solitary into the earth, the oak tree grows its roots wide and interlocks with other oak trees in the surrounding area. And you can’t bring down a hundred oak trees bound beneath the soil! How do we survive the unnatural disasters of climate change, environmental injustice, over-policing, mass-imprisonment, militarization, economic inequality, corporate globalization, and displacement? We must connect in the underground, my people! In this way, we shall survive.”

Mycelium, the threading that makes up most mushrooms, communicates between trees, particularly about toxic growth,59 a process called mycorrhiza.

Humans are unique because we compete when it isn’t necessary. We could reason our way to more sustainable processes, but we use our intelligence to outsmart each other. We compete for fun, for ego.

Grace Lee Boggs and find that she was there ahead of me—on the wall of her home is a sign: “Organizing is to the community what spiritual practice is to the individual.”

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.

Being seen is actually non-negotiable, though I can hide, or I can determine my level of grace and relationship in it. On so many levels, interdependence requires being seen, as much as possible, as your true self.

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.

Sometimes there isn’t one definitive truth. (My favorite situations.) And sometimes there is one and you can’t see it. (Least favorite. Least.)

Just at least consider that the place where you are wrong might be the most fertile ground for connect...

And in a beautiful twist, being soft in your rightness, as opposed to smashing people with your brilliance, can open others up to...

The more I accept this, the more I can share my contradictory truths with those who can support me and help me move towards my best self. I am not turning against myself, I am multitudes.

those who wish to support me need me to be vulnerable with that inner contradiction.

It’s data, all this learning. Tender data.

“There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.” —Ella Baker

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

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.

There are two major movement cycles that I want to uplift here, Occupy and Black Lives Matter/Movement for Black Lives, as recent nonlinear organizing processes that started off to speak to class and race intersections in the US, respectively. Both grew from common longing, from a relinquishing of control, and from a celebration of leaderfull transformation. Both have been challenged by the limits of our human capacity to cooperate, sustain, and grow in conflict; by the weight of large-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”

P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations: 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.

There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.

Another lesson I observed from the people’s mic experience at Occupy Wall Street…if someone called for the mic, they were granted it. But if people weren’t feeling the statement, eventually they stopped repeating it. I shared that observation with Jenny and she observed that in a way, twitter has prepped us for this succinct and self-selected rebroadcasting of each other.

“We’re basically this very young species, only 200,000 years old. We’re one of the newcomers, and we’re going through the same process that other species go through, which is, how do I keep myself alive while taking care of the place that’s going to keep my offspring alive?” —Janine Benyus

Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.

I have an inner protocol in my doula work with parents and babies: ask myself if I am needed, support only as needed, do absolutely everything that is needed (change the diaper, sweep the floor, rub mama’s feet, take out the trash—no task is menial), and make space for the natural order to emerge.

And finally, if you don’t want to invest growth energy in anything, just be quiet. If you are not going to help birth or raise the child, then shhhhh. You aren’t required to have or even work towards the solution, but if you know a change is needed and your first instinct when you see people trying to figure out how to change and transform is to poop on them, perhaps it is time you just hush your mouth.

As Detroit movement ancestor Jimmy Boggs taught, “It is only in relation to other bodies and many somebodies that anybody is somebody. Don’t get it into your cotton-picking mind that you are somebody in yourself.”

(in a trashcan there is no difference between a rat and a squirrel)—have

“If we are going to heal, let it be glorious.” —Beyoncé