Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Once there were kings and queens all over the earth. Someday we might speak of presidents and CEOs in past tense only.

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

There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have.35 Find it.

Less prep, more presence.

We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance.

Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not.

We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion.

office. And what I saw clearly was that, at a local level, we—Americans—don’t know how to do democracy. We don’t know how to make decisions together, how to create generative compromises, how to advance policies that center justice.

This awareness led me to look at organizations more critically. So many of our organizations working for social change are structured in ways that reflect the status quo. We have singular charismatic leaders, top down structures, money-driven programs, destructive methods of engaging conflict, unsustainable work cultures, and little to no impact on the issues at hand. This makes sense; it’s the water we’re swimming in.

Generally we have to let go of the success that we feel, as individuals and organizations, when capitalism works for us.

How do we prepare not just for suffering, but for sharing and innovation?

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?

currently, organizations are pitted against each other to access money (less and less money), rather than creating and investing together to maximize a diversity of resources from money, to people, to spaces, to skills.

In a successful Ruckus action, the visions and solutions are deeper and more compelling than the injustice. (We are calling for a movement-wide shift away from action that isn’t grounded in a vision of deep systemic change, as that ultimately is a misuse of our time and energy.)

This often results in groups centering work that doesn’t depend on factors outside of their control (such as funders, or elections, which come and go and should be well used but not directive or debilitating).

If the vision is only clear to one person, that person ends up trying to drive everyone towards their vision, or at minimum control how everyone gets to the vision.

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

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.

leadership of women is non-negotiable and shifts the results, particularly in the funding world.

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.

durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.

interdependence requires being seen, as much as possible, as your true self.

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.

And most of all, the childlike request inside of story telling: Can you listen while I feel this? Again? Again?

“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.”

I have heard the stories from elders, stories about how the non-movement public perceived an absence of leadership, how that perception shook the movement’s self-perception.

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.

Whether a leader is great or not, funders have traditionally preferred the narrative of a rock star leader, and have invested in individuals more than in missions. The people of an organization make or break the work, and the best mission will not be realized without the right people behind it. The shiny stars are rarely the ones actually getting the work done, or even doing the most exciting thinking in the organization.

with less shame, i say no to anything that wastes my time. i gather and give myself hours that belong to no one else, alone or with healer types. i claim time when i can be in my body and self. and in that solitude, or healing company, i become a defined place for a time-traveling emotion to locate, an x on the nonlinear map of my emotional life.

Screaming why, and/or expressing fury at the stupid unfair fucking game of it all (this may include hours and hours, even lifetimes, of lost faith);

Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow.

I tend to roll with a critical crowd, and I have to work hard sometimes to keep my heart open when there are lots of critical questions sitting there for me to ask:

Or… Is it the decentralized movement we have been awaiting?

is: humans have a multitude of cares, of passions…trying to lockstep us into one predictable way of being is the essential desire of corporations, because if you can predict what people will want and do, then you can profit by coming up with appropriate products and activities for them.

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.

In that paradigm there is no failure. Everything we attempt, everything we do, is either growing up as its roots go deeper, or it’s decomposing, leaving its lessons in the soil for the next attempt.

Zuccotti Park

This makes it seem as if Zuccotti Park is not in New York...

And sometimes it is hard to admit that, for all our strategizing, we weren’t the ones to articulate the moment. Sometimes, it can make us into haters.

There are way too many people in critique mode who belong to no formation, who spend their lives writing volunteer think pieces in 140 character bursts of Internet. It makes me feel defensive of the messy chaotic beauty of transformation. Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.

Critique as a participant who is shaping the work.

Humans have made of ourselves a hierarchy of value in which some people are disposable—can fail at being human, can be killed as a punishment, can be collateral damage. Can be wasted. Or tortured. Or locked in a small box for their whole lives, given no hope of transformation, or a future in society.

We need to transform all of the energy we currently put into war and punishment into creating solutions for how to continue on this planet.

While we are working towards a world where all conflict can be resolved in a transformative way, we aren’t there yet, and a lot of messy shit goes down in the name of transformative justice.

Stop trying to make and fix others, and instead be curious about what they have made of themselves.

(the positive mob mentality I participate in for, say, Beyoncé or Björk feels quite different, though I know there is something in there about belonging…eh, next book).

Demonizing is more efficient than relinquishing our world views,

This question feels particularly important in the age of social media, where we can make our pain viral before we’ve even had a chance to feel it.

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.

“When forced into a binary, you always choose wrong.” —Jelani Wilson