Emergent Strategy Quotes

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

“Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Detroit filmmaker Oya Amakisi once shared with me the words of General Baker, a Detroit labor organizer and leader, who said, “You keep asking how do we get the people here? I say, what will we do when they get here?”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“One metaphor I use for mediation si that there is a wall, and the goal is to get on the same side of the wall, and look at it together. Sometimes to do this each side has to take turns "visiting" the other side of the wall. People may decide too tay on their side of the wall, but it helps to understand that the wall is not a forever wall, it can be crossed, circumvented, ro even brought down. I will also encourage people to stop "building the wall" by looking for additional pieces of discontent.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“To get really fancy, have a wall that runs the length of the space you are in and have a past, present, and future section. Let the Brag and Swag portion be in the past. Let the meeting notes accumulate as the present. Then put the next steps and agreements and decision of the meeting be the future.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“The behaviours of abuse are also survival-based, learned behaviours 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.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Lifting people up based on personality replicates the dynamics of power and hierarchy that movements claim to be dismantling.”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“And most of all, the childlike request inside of story telling: Can you listen while I feel this?
Again?
Again?”
― adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“I came to this edge of Mexico to pull a book together because, a few years ago, it was here, near this tiny portion of the massive ocean, that I 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

“I will be satisfied if this book sparks conversations, new practices, and projects where people keep noticing, observing, and learning about emergence and liberation”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“to turn our legacy towards harmony.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“but in my twenties, when i was gutshaking about things that were leaping out of me like emo tweens, that’s when i learned about the time traveling emotion.
it is like anything else that traverses time, both fully of another time and fully present in the place when it appears. in the case of grief, the time traveling emotion touches into your sadness over a present day experience of absence, and then drags forward a living satchel of the most tender innocent moments, the smallest memory. or perhaps sucks your heart back in time.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.”
—Octavia Butler”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“love isn’t always a doorway to forever…sometimes it is a door to another love. Always it is an emergent process.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds