Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

by Adrienne Maree Brown

Real time is slower than social-media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility.

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.

I believe transformative justice could yield deeper trust, resilience, and interdependence. All these mass and intimate punishments keep us small and fragile. And right now our movements and the people within them need to be massive and complex and strong.

Collaborative Ideation is a way to get into this—ideation is the process of birthing new ideas, and the practice of collaborative ideation is about sharing that process as early as possible.

The more people who cocreate the future, the more people whose concerns will be addressed from the foundational level in this world.

Because of our ancestors, because of us, and because of the children we are raising, there will be a future without police and prisons. Yes. There will be a future without rape. Without harassment, and constant fear, and childhood sexual assault. A future without war, hunger, violence. With abundance.

Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.

I think that is my attraction to nature. Its somehow proof of faith. Something more powerful than us yet that we are apart of at the same time. The most powerful thing for organizers to have, I believe, is faith. This belief that we can win, that we can change the world, that we can all be better.” —Terry Marshall

I think part of my approach to consensus is that I recognize it as our normal human orientation. We are innately cooperative and social beings. I often tell my students that there is a reason humans are born unable to move, dress, eat on their own, unable to protect themselves. We are born into relationships of dependence and interdependence. It’s what we long for, and we struggle within decision-making models and structures that don’t support that deepest desire. So part of my approach to teaching consensus, over time, has been to ground it historically.

Autumn: I share how differently consensus arises within culture vs. political/movement spaces, and the history of consensus practice in movement spaces as deeply related to feminist and Indigenous movement work. That it is work of collective liberation, no matter how often it is co-opted.

In nature it’s more like we all get our day, our time. Nothing blooms 365 days of the year,

our gifts thrive in very different circumstances.

I have a commitment I repeat to myself in key leadership moments throughout the day. “I trust myself in the face of the unknown.” While I say it, I focus on my breath, ground through my heels, feel my back, and remember that all of my skills and experience are available and have prepared me for just this moment.