Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” —Octavia Butler, Parable of the Trickster79

We are creating a world we have never seen. We are whispering it to each other cuddled in the dark, and we are screaming it at people who are so scared of it that they dress themselves in war regalia to turn and face us.

And in order to learn together you have to be good at humility and curiosity.

Sometimes what is happening in the world is so terrifying and urgent that we forget our complexity, or wonder why we would spend time on ourselves or take time for our friendships when there is so much external work to do. What I am noticing is that it is not a privilege to practice coevolution through friendship—it is the deepest work.

Let me not say yes to Lives I don’t want

Breath and sensation awareness is the foundational entry into meditation that works for me.

Does it work for most people? I would guess not...

After years of trying to meditate sitting up and spending the entire time in pain, I noticed that the times I felt most capable of meditation were at the end of yoga classes.

And remember, passion is a more valuable force for action and accountability than obligation, so let the goals be inspiring, uplifting what will inspire the most passionate conversation and participation.

Again, our tendency is to make use of the precious in-person time of a meeting by filling up every minute, from the beginning to the end of the day, with formal session time, creating schedules that are hard to change when new information comes along. These agendas are often burdened by an unrealistic hope, an underestimation of how long conversations may actually take.

Folks are so used to not being heard. So used to not getting their needs met. When people feel heard, the time starts to expand as people move past expressing and start to be able to listen.

In the United States, where I do most of my facilitation, there is a socialized tendency towards competition—“My idea is the best and I am just here to sell it!” Well…no, thank you.

My confession here is that I have, at times, grown annoyed with those participants who tend more towards deconstruction, anxiety, or frustration… They are the ones often less able to state clearly what they want. However, if I can drop in and set my annoyance aside, those folks are sometimes trying to get at the heart of the matter, or name the root schism in the room—the thing that is unnamed because it hard to name. Taking time to hear the participants in the margins of the agenda can actually help get the event on point.

Wherever there is a problem, there are already people acting on the problem in some fashion. Understanding those actions is the starting point for developing effective strategies to resolve the problem, so we focus on the solutions, not the problems.

We will not wait to be perfect, because we believe the time is now and we would rather be held accountable for our mistakes than forgiven our inaction.

“Roger that, homeboyyyyy!” (Or however y’all end conversations.)

Best practice: make room for brainstorm-level ideas from the group, saying yes to all the ideas. Some folks, more than will admit it, feel shut down if their ideas are being debated and shot down as they speak.

Giving an agenda adequate space and room for human interaction and discussion often leads to significantly more ground getting covered in an authentic way in the time available.

Taking the time to reflect on the changes that are taking place is crucial for understanding nonlinear and iterative growth.

(Calling them “retreats” when they are work sessions is disingenuous. Plan retreats too! Just don’t confuse them.)

Loretta Ross teaches us that, “When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement.”

When more people imagine together, and then step from imagining into thinking through the structures and protocols of a society together, then more needs are attended to. Responding to common text is a great way to do this. And it doesn’t have to be just a reading group—it can be a group that watches films, listens to music, or compares experiments in changing movement practices.

Grace actually spoke of this in her autobiography. For a long time she thought the most radical thing she could do was to hold tight to her political ideas.117 And at a certain point it dawned on her that if she held one idea as conditions changed around her, her ideas would no longer be relevant. And that, in fact, the most radical thing she could do was to keep evolving her ideas as new information came her way.

clarifying the Decider/Delegator, and who is Accountable, Responsible, Consulted, and Informed about decisions.

We often think that we must hold our position, regardless of what we learn or feel. But in fact, the opposite is true. We must learn to develop positions together, adapting to the changing conditions around us—sometimes this means we must relinquish our positions, to voice our feelings and thoughts, and hear and be influenced by, other people’s opinions and information.

We are socialized to come up with ideas in isolation and compete with them, to have the best idea and get rewarded for it. But if we want a world that works for more people, we have to get into the practice of ideating together, letting others as close as possible into the intimate space where ideas are born.

Low Tech/High Tech

How to adapt this into pandemic/Zoom times?

early onset arthritis

???? You can get arthritis at any age