Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

moving from a reactionary, surface-change direct-action organization to vision-based, systemic-change-oriented direct-action organization.

“Transform yourself to transform the world.”—Grace Lee Boggs. We aim to be an organizational model of the change we call for in the world.

As an organization, The Ruckus Society’s operating principles include the “Jemez Principles” and the “Environmental Justice Principles.” These principles mean we move towards our vision of sustainability and self-determination through organizing that values natural operating systems, understanding the power of uncovering the root causes of problems, and asking, “What are the root problems in my community, and what do deep, foundational, rooted solutions look like?” This is thinking from a place of healing, more than dominating others with our beliefs.

There is a deep trust in this: to lift because the birds around you are lifting, to live based on your collective real-time adaptations. In this way thousands of birds or fish or bees can move together, each empowered with basic rules and a vision to live. Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.

Adaptation reduces exhaustion. No one bears the burden alone of figuring out the next move and muscling towards it. There is an efficiency at play—is something not working? Stop. Change. If something is working, keep doing it—learning and innovating as you go.

What is easy is sustainable. Birds coast when they can. As an individual, get really good at being intentional with where you put your energy, letting go as quickly as you can of things that aren’t part of your visionary life’s work. Then you can give your all, from a well-resourced place, when the storm comes, or for those last crucial miles.

What I mean is, it’s my choice… If I spend these thirty minutes berating myself for not triple checking the directions or in some other way not being myself (because most of my stress takes the shape of self attack—“why don’t you have a better memory?”; “why don’t you prepare your travel better?”; “why aren’t you more like [insert superior human of the moment]?”; “why don’t you listen to your gut more?”), I will just show up feeling funky, lesser than, and like my precious life has been wasted. I don’t want to waste any of this time.

having caucus work can really help—but if it’s on side it means extra work. plan for how to weave it in. instead of introductions at the beginning, which no one will remember, have participants say their names as they speak in the room. use small group or fishbowl technology in the labs.

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

the oak tree held its ground. How? 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.”

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. We have to embrace our complexity. We are complex. While many of us articulate a yearning for a more simple life, we continue practicing complexity as our evolutionary path.

At the end of it all even if we don’t see the fruits of our labor, shouldn’t we be able to say we loved and enjoyed each other? That’s why I want to act and be like a palm tree, providing shade, covering my comrades (instead of throwing shade lol). I want to provide food (dates). I want to be what they can lean on. I want to be a resource, sustaining our work.” —Aisha Shillingford

Do you already know that your existence—who and how you are—is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you? Not after or because you do some particular thing, but simply the miracle of your life. And that the people around you, and the place(s), have contributions as well? Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in?

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.

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.

Just at least consider that the place where you are wrong might be the most fertile ground for connecting with and receiving others. And in a beautiful twist, being soft in your rightness, as opposed to smashing people with your brilliance, can open others up to whatever wisdom you’ve accumulated.

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.

In a non-linear process, everything is part of the learning, every step. That includes constructive criticism, it is part of the feedback loop—experiment, gather feedback, experiment again. This is how we learn.

when my feelings started to work their way back out of me, to the surface, i was overwhelmed. i put my hands over my mouth to hold it in, but it didn’t matter, i was brimming, screaming.

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.

This has the potential to be deeper, because it feels less fleeting, less temporary, less spectacle.

To speak to the whiteness of the crowd, I actually felt moved to see so many white people, very normal-looking white people, standing around the edges of this park looking liberated themselves, holding up signs that criticize capitalism. Some were speaking from their privilege, and others from their own economic struggles. But to have masses of white people in the streets talking about the economy with a progressive decentralized grassroots perspective, and have it not be the Tea Party, is a tipping point signal. The crises are becoming clear even to those not being directly oppressed, or those directly organizing.

I love the other options I am hearing: “Decolonize ‘insert city’”; “Occupy within”; and “Foreclose ‘insert institution.’” It feels spacious. It feels like something you can do, no matter where you are, by authentically applying yourself to the changes you wish to see.

Don’t sit this out. It has room for you. Find out, start, or help shape what is happening in your town.

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.

How do we live compassion, justice, love, accessibility, in alignment with this planet and with the people on it? How do we live our values? As we are, so it (our work, our movement) will be.

It is so important to cultivate our patience, our thoughtfulness, our willingness to slow down and seek the wisdom of those not already part of our movements—not to get them in step with our point of view, but because we need their lived experiential wisdom to shape solutions that will work for the majority of living beings.

As much as we, who do and/or fund social and environmental justice, speak of movements, when they actually spark, many of us cannot tolerate all the newness and unknown that comes along with scaling up our efforts to create change. We want instant order, more familiarity, a perfect plan for all of eternity, a set of lock-step agreements to either adopt or reject.

Get into an experiment or two, feel how messy it is to unlearn supremacy and repurpose your life for liberation. Critique as a participant who is shaping the work. Be willing to do whatever task is required of you, whatever you are capable of, feed people, spread the word, write pieces, make art, listen, take action, etc. Be able to say: ‘“I invest my energy in what I want to see grow. I belong to efforts I deeply believe in and help shape those.”

We are all learning what it means to be somebodies who shape the future, to operate at the scale of transformation.

“From Starfish I have learned that if we keep our core intact, we can regenerate. We can fall apart, lose limbs, and re-grow them as long as we don’t let anyone threaten that central disc’s integrity. We can grow so many different arms, depending on what kind of sea star we are. We have to nourish ourselves with the resources we are surrounded by, with our community assets if you will, and by doing so we help keep ecosystems delicately balanced.” —JoLillian T. Zwerdling

“When I was young I was taught to fear big forces of nature—tornadoes, thunderstorms, snowstorms, hurricanes. Taught they cause destruction and devastation. Taught to hide under desks, in basements, stay close to home. For me, somatic work has been about relearning and reconnecting to the wisdom and life in natural forces. That what is most alive leads to opening, creating, change. That in the destruction of something lies a whole new world of possibility—a place where patterns can finally become unhinged and there’s space for something new to take its place. Not that this doesn’t come without loss, grief, devastation, it often does. But to see that there’s also resilience, the beauty of survival, the move to create and thrive despite what surrounds us. To me that’s the essence of our fights for liberation.” —Spenta Kandawalla

Humans, especially humans who persist in trying to transform the conditions of life, are remarkably resilient. We experience so much loss, pain, hardship, attack—and we persist! Resilience is in our nature, and we recover from things that we would be justified in giving up over, again and again. Resilience is unveiled when we are triggered, injured, heartbroken, attacked, challenged.

One core practice of resilience is transformative justice, transforming the conditions that make injustice possible. Resilience is perhaps our most beautiful, miraculous trait.

Emergent strategy is adaptive and interdependent. When Neymar and Silva were taken out, Brazil didn’t have the capacity or depth on their team to adapt. The lack of cohesion from their team felt loud. Germany moved like a flock of birds over and around the field. They worked as one body to take possession of the ball and move it. Any time Brazil or Argentina got the ball, Germany suddenly had four players around them. It didn’t feel like a formation, it felt like interdependent murmuration towards a shared intention—they flew towards the ball. The sheer number of team members attending to the ball at any given point meant that Germany was consistently creating more possibilities for itself to have the ball, to have choice over what happened next, to get the chance to score.

Nothing in nature is disposable. Part of the resilience of nature is that nothing in nature is wasted. The earth swallows it all through mouths or soil or water. This is such a simple beautiful truth. Everything is food, fuel, compost, a home for some other creature.

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. And even those of us who critique these punitive methods, who are committed to justice, practice our own versions of prisons, blacklists, takedowns, and public executions. When we don’t agree with each other, we destroy each other. When we feel competitive with each other, we splinter and…destroy the other. We say we don’t care, and then invest time and energy into cultivating conflict with each other. When we feel scared, we destroy each other instead of working to get to the root of our fear. How do we shift into a culture in which conflict and difference is generative?

Domination or peace? I argue that peace is the most strategic option for our long-term survival. Not an uninformed or compromising peace—a peace that is built on truth, accountability, and equity.

Transformative Justice: Acknowledges the reality of state harm. Looks for alternative ways to address/interrupt harm, which do not rely on the state. Relies on organic, creative strategies that are community created and sustained. Transforms the root causes of violence, not only the individual experience.

Safety, Healing, and Agency For All Safety, Healing, and Individual Agency for Survivors. Accountability and a transformation for people who harm. Community action, healing, and/or group/org accountability. Transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence.

When we are children or dependents, we don’t usually have full agency to shift or leave an abusive dynamic because our safety and livelihood depend upon our abuser, and many of us figure out other ways of “leaving”—dissociation, appeasing, addiction, etc.

You have the right to tell your story. The silence and shame around these dynamics makes people think they are alone and especially flawed. Not so. Organizations are rife with abusive bosses or collective members, social justice movements are full of couples in private battles against the oppressive dynamics we face in the world. You are not alone, and you do not have to be silent.

You do not have the right to traumatize abusive people, to attack them personally or publicly, or to sabotage anyone else’s health. The behaviors of abuse are also survival-based, learned behaviors rooted in some pain. If you can look through the lens of compassion, you will find hurt and trauma there. If you are the abused party, healing that hurt is not your responsibility and exacerbating that pain is not your justified right.

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 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.

Relinquish Frankenstein. You are not creating people to be with, or work with, some idealized individuals made of perfect parts of personality that you discovered on your life journey. You are meeting individuals with their own full lives behind and ahead of them. Stop trying to make and fix others, and instead be curious about what they have made of themselves.

How can we pivot toward practicing transformative justice? How do we shift from individual, interpersonal, and inter-organizational anger toward viable, generative, sustainable systemic change?