Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Wherever you are beginning this, take a deep breath and notice how you feel in your body, and how the world around you feels. Take a breath for the day you have had so far. And a breath for this precious moment, which cannot be recreated. Now, another for the day and night coming.

began to realize how important emergent strategy, strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions, is to me—the potential scale of transformation that could come from movements intentionally practicing this adaptive, relational way of being, on our own and with others.

Emergence is one of the best concepts I have learned for discussing this wow, this wonder. “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”2

Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass,

Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

Scaling up would mean going deeper, being more vulnerable and more empathetic.

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

The less I engage in gossip, the less I harbor suspicion, the more space I find within myself for miraculous experiences. 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. Nothing is required of me more than being, and creating. Simultaneously being present with who I am, who we are as a species…and creating who we must become, and within that who I must become.

It reminds me that they all seem to have this solid core of truth within themselves that cannot be shaken by external pressures.

I must walk my own path.

“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

Welcome as a series of Simple interactions

Nothing is wasted, or a failure. Emergence is a system that makes use of everything in the iterative process. It’s all data.

Octavia Butler (amb) All successful life is (Fractal) Adaptable, (Adaptive) Opportunistic, (Nonlinear/Iterative) Tenacious, (Resilient/Transformative Justice) Interconnected, and (Interdependent/Decentralized) Fecund. (Creates More Possibilities) Understand this. (Scholarship, Reflection) Use it. (Practice/Experiment) Shape God. (Intention)

The waves we create are both continuous and a one-time occurrence.

I thought then, and I think now: This can’t be all. No one survives this way, not long term.

Kenny Bailey13 helped me understand this—that justice, rights, things we take for granted, are not permanent.

We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure, because it’s all data. But first we imagine. We are in an imagination battle.

What we pay attention to grows,

As Toni Cade Bambara has taught us, we must make just and liberated futures irresistible.16

Grace started asking us what our movements would look like if we focused on critical connections instead of critical mass.

We need each other. I love the idea of shifting from “mile wide inch deep” movements to “inch wide mile deep” movements that schism the existing paradigm.

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

Definition to quote

But what I noticed is that her leaders are adaptive—riding change like dolphins ride the ocean. Adaptive but also intentional, like migrating birds who know how to get where they’re going even when a storm pushes them a hundred miles off course.

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 strategies let us practice, in every possible way, the world we want to see.

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.

decentralization,

How could decentralisation Be of benefit ei HE It We establish common principles we can act ln the way our context requires While still moving forward together

Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

Margaret Wheatley

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.

Leadership

In addition, she resonated with Wheatley’s idea that critical connections are more important in a long-term transformation process than critical mass.

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.

It has expanded for me over the years as I have come to believe that facts, guilt, and shame are limited motivations for creating change, even though those are the primary forces we use in our organizing work. I suspect that to really transform our society, we will need to make justice one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have.27

Audre Lorde’s essay The Uses of the Erotic

my experience, healing happens when a place of trauma or pain is given full attention, really listened to. Healing is the resilience instinct of our bodies, a skill we unlearn as we are taught to pay for and rely on data and medicine outside of our own awareness to be well. I have been discovering, or surrendering, to my gifts as a healer.

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.”

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.

Find a way to Connect with change. Draw energy from it

the organizing model of Ella Baker,

Robert Gass’s work on the art of transformation now developing and evolving into emergent strategies at the Social Transformation Project under the leadership of Jodie Tonita, Eugene Kim, Idelisse Malave, and others.

Transition as transformation

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

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.

Love this write up for transition work

Grace often said that 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.”

I do believe that what we pay attention to grows, so I wanted to stop growing the crises, the critique.

“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

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

Grace articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” 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.

It has meant learning to work collaboratively, which goes against my inner “specialness.” I am socialized to seek achievement alone, to try to have the best idea and forward it through the masses. But that leads to loneliness and, I suspect, extinction. If we are all trying to win, no one really ever wins.

“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