Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

I’ve always rebelled against anyone I perceived as an authority. It’s been hard and rewarding work to relinquish some of that resistance in order to let wisdom in.

love the idea of shifting from “mile wide inch deep” movements to “inch wide mile deep” movements

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.

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

(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

What you pay attention to grows.

In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education.

Burn out. Overwork, underpay, unrealistic expectations. Organizational and movement splitting. Personal drama disrupting movements. Mission drift, specifically in the direction of money. Stagnation—an inability to make decisions.

We have to create futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same kind of person.

We hone our skills of naming and analyzing the crises. I learned in school how to deconstruct—but how do we move beyond our beautiful deconstruction? Who teaches us to reconstruct?

We reach out to and build relationships with groups we respect, to lay the groundwork for being called to frontline work. We do not insert ourselves into people’s political or community work.

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. That makes sense, and it’s so exhausting. Decentralized work requires more trust building on the front end, but ultimately it is easier, more fluid.

I am learning to see human behavior, even my own mistakes, as part of a larger natural order.

One of our key roles, as social movements, must be to harness the shocks and direct the slides—all

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

notice who isn’t speaking, let others speak your truth.

do here what we are seeking to do in the 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.

The idea of interdependence is that we can meet each other’s needs in a variety of ways, that we can truly lean on others and they can lean on us. It means we have to decentralize our idea of where solutions and decisions happen, where ideas come from.

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

being soft in your rightness, as opposed to smashing people with your brilliance, can open others up to whatever wisdom you’ve accumulated.

Can you listen while I feel this?

“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

mainstream idea of what leadership looked like (male, straight, loud, individualistic, articulate, handsome, charming, etc.).

I have talked with other leaders who got bumped into rock star status as young organizers and almost all of us share a few core experiences: People stopped seeing us. We became a place to project longings and critiques. We lost touch with the fact that it’s ok to make mistakes. Then we made the biggest mistakes of our lives. And we learned the hard way that rock star status is a cyclical thing. It becomes its own work, maintaining and promoting the rock star in the organization.

Otherwise we are monsters. We can make missions drift, can get embroiled in inter-organizational or inter-movement beef that does not serve the people, can get into a victim mentality and direct a lot of movement energy towards defending our egos, or get convinced of our superiority. Mostly, we can get too isolated for accountability.

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.

The shiny stars are rarely the ones actually getting the work done, or even doing the most exciting thinking in the organization.

the broken heart can cover more territory.

grief is gratitude.

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.

make space for the natural order to emerge.

Critique as a participant

When we imagine the world we want to shift towards, are we dreaming of being the winners of the future? Or are we dreaming of a world where winning is no longer necessary because there are no enemies?

Don’t let fear make you settle for something you know isn’t working.

Here are some reasons we swallow our truths: Capitalism: we are taught that love is about belonging to one person or community, and we must contort in order to ensure continued belonging. We are taught that our value is in what we can produce, and emotions impede production. The oppression of supremacy: we are taught that, if we are not white, male, straight, able, wealthy, adult, etc., our truths don’t matter. This starts very early, we are taught that our feelings and thoughts as children are unimportant, that we are to “be seen and not heard.”

The oppression of false peace: we are taught that our truths are disruptive, and that disruption is a negative act. This one is particularly insidious, and ties back into capitalism—only those moving towards profit can and should create disruption, everyone else should be complacent consumers.

destroying a person doesn’t destroy all of the systems that allow harmful people to do harm.

It is the emphasis on a tomorrow that centers the dignity of that seed, particularly in the face of extinction, that marks, for me, the afrofuturist.

In the face of daunting challenges, we must summon the courage to believe we are the ones we have been waiting for, take risks, and experiment towards solutions.

“We don’t practice to feel good, we practice to feel more.”

“If you do not trust the people, they will become untrustworthy.” —Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

We sit with the organizers of a gathering and try to figure out ahead of time every single necessary conversation we want to see happen, and then create an agenda that imposes our priorities, or the organizers’ priorities, on the people who we have invited to gather, ostensibly because we care about what they think, or about what they are doing.

Why Am I Talking?

Be open to someone else speaking your truth;

Building, not selling—when you speak, converse, don’t pitch;

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

the more people who deeply share a vision, the more possible that vision becomes. Build the vision across your group.

having community to learn with is actually really crucial for human development.