Emergent Strategy Quotes

“Another metaphor I use for mediation is the "river of time". I often find that people's attention is flowing along the river of time. One person or group's attention is flowing towards the past, towards what has already happened. They can't see the present, or turn towards the future. Meanwhile the other person or group's attention is flowing towards the future, and they don't understand why things can't move forward. Everyone generally thinks they are standing still, being present, in the present. Once people come into awareness of which way their attention is flowing, they have increased agency. There is usually stuff in the past that needs to be resolved to be able to look towards the future. Or their river needs to diverge into two or more channels of water. It's ok...it's all flowing towards the sea anyway.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Identifying what your group can do well, is passionate about, and is needed—that's the sweet spot.
That's your mission.
Your mission should be brief and clear, so that you can refer to it at moments of decision, at forks in your organizational road. It should resonate with everyone in the organization, a compelling statement that makes everyone want to show up and kick ass.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“We presume our power, not our powerlessness. We are agents, not victims. We spend more time building than attacking.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Gibrán Rivera once articulated a question to me: "What is the next most elegant step?" [...] An elegant step is one that acknowledges what is known and unknown, and what the capacity of this group actually is. An elegant step allows humility, allows people to say "Actually we need to do some research" or "Actually we need to talk to some folks not in this room" or "Actually we need a full day to build this plan out into something realistic and attainable.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“We stumble, we trip, we fall down, we get up. We stumble, we trip, we fall down, we get up. The body transforms, the mind transforms, everything transforms. Some people start with the mind, some people start with the body, some people start with communities. Whatever the case is, where you start and witness transformation—take it into all aspects of your life. Let it seep in.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“[...] "all organizing is science fiction," by which we mean that social justice work is about creating systems of justice and equity in the future, creating conditions that we have never experienced.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“The natural world manifests life in ecosystems, not monocultures. One of my favorite ways of understanding nature creating more possibilities, is to watch water move through the world. Water creates the ways for itself, moving with gravity, moving around obstacles, wearing down obstacles, reshaping the world. When there isn't an overt way forward, water seeps into the land, becomes a vapor in the sky, freezes into ice. When the time comes, water moves over the land in cloud form and nourishes elsewhere. And, of course, we humans are mostly water. And look how many ways we manifest.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“We call it "transformative justice" when we're throwing knives and insults, exposing each other's worst mistakes, reducing each other to moments of failure. We call it "holding each other accountable.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“There are so many formations I am not a part of—my non-participation is all I need to say. When I do offer critique, it si from a space of relationship, partnership, and advancing a solution.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Don't sit this out. It has room for you. Find out, start, or help shape what is happening in your town.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“I have been in movement spaces for a long time and we have a way of doing things that is so steeped in critique that I have often wondered if we would strangle movement before it could blossom. Sometimes I think we put up the critiques to excuse ourselves from getting involved, and sometimes I think we do it to protect our hearts from getting broken if it doesn't work out. Critique, alone, can keep us from having to pick up the responsibility of figuring out solutions. Sometimes I think we need to liberate ourselves from critique, both internal and external, to truly give change a chance.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“the more I learn to feel, the less time it takes a time-traveling emotion to catch me. years instead of decades, hours instead of months, seconds instead of weeks.
I am even learning, sometimes/more often, to feel in real time. and to survive feeling a whole emotion in real time.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“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.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“We need to move from competitive ideation, trying to push our individual ideas, to collective ideation, collaborative ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“and mushrooms—the resilience in these structures, which we think of as weeds and fungi, the incomprehensible scale, the clarity of identity, excites me.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“In movement work, I have been facilitating groups to shift from a culture of strategic planning to one of strategic intentions—what are our intentions, informed by our vision? What do we need to be and do to bring our vision to pass? How do we bring those intentions to life throughout every change, in every aspect of our work?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Dii Nvwati (Cherokee). Translation: Skunk medicine. The skunk asks us to defend ourselves effectively, without causing further conflict. Self-protection but do no harm. Gangsterish peace-making. That is the kind of masculinity that I try to embody. With my leadership, with my poise, with my privileges. As my body continues on a journey of thickening, muscle hardening, limbs lengthening, Ayurvedic drying, shorter synapse pathways, fuzzier intuition, and choppier verbal articulation all facilitated by weekly testosterone injections these are poignant lessons to forward. The objective is for men and masculine people to not yield our power to others… Women and femme people don’t need our paternalistic sickle to swath as we ‘tap out.’ We must figure out power without domination. The skunk asks us to use our powers effectively, without wiping ourselves out. Without recapitulating top down, give-less-to-get-more social structures. Just as the skunk does not seek to be the bear, let us not attempt to trade places with the oppressor. Let us navigate a road of paradigm shifting that seeks to salve both current social and economic injuries, but also prepare a sustainable method of being for seven generations to come.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Organizing is to the community what spiritual practice is to the individual.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, almost everything lost its footing. Houses were detached from their foundations, trees and shrubbery were uprooted, sign posts and vehicles floated down the rivers that became of the streets. But amidst the whipping winds and surging water, 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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Shifts also result from well-organized communities creating new institutions that meet peoples’ needs as responses to the shocks and slides better than the dominant systems can, such as food sovereignty projects, collectivized housing systems, cooperative economics (time banks, worker co-ops, food shares, community-based restorative justice projects, etc.)”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Nature has taught me about fluid adaptability. About not only weathering storms, but using howling winds to spread seeds wide, torrential rains to nurture roots so they can grow deeper and stronger. Nature has taught me that a storm can be used to clear out branches that are dying, to let go of that which was keeping us from growing in new directions. These are lessons we need for organizing. As Octavia taught us, the only lasting truth is change. We will face social and political storms we could not even imagine. The question becomes not just how do we survive them, but how do we prepare so when we do suddenly find ourselves in the midst of an unexpected onslaught, we can capture the potential, the possibilities inherent in the chaos, and ride it like dawn skimming the horizon?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Your life is your spiritual path. Don’t be quick to abandon it for bigger and better experiences. You are getting exactly the experiences you need to grow. If your growth seems to be slow or uneventful for you, it is because you have not fully embraced the situations and relationships at hand. To know the self is to allow everything, to embrace the totality of who we are—all that we think and feel, all that we fear, all that we love.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“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.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Assessment for Creating More Possibility What are all of your gifts? Are you living a life that honors all of your gifts? If yes, how did you create all this possibility for yourself? If no, how can you create more possibility today? Tomorrow? This month? This year? What are your organization’s unique gifts? Is your organization able to hold complexity?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“It is useful to classify the economic and ecological disruptions that make up this “new normal” of instability into two groups: shocks and slides. Shocks present themselves as acute moments of disruption. These are, for example, market crashes, huge disasters and uprisings. Slides, on the other hand, are incremental by nature. They can be catastrophic, but they are not experienced as acute. Sea level rise is a slide. Rising unemployment is a slide. The rising costs of food & energy are a slide.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“We have experienced what it's like to release any assumption that one person has all the skills needed to lead and support the work.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“One of my favorite questions today is: How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Many of us have been socialized to understand that constant growth, violent competition, and critical mass are the ways to create change. But emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend more upon critical, deep, and authentic connections, a thread that can be tugged for support and resilience. The quality of connection between the nodes in the patterns.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds