Emergent Strategy

Emergent Strategy - Adrienne Maree Brown

“I dedicate this book to the memory of Grace Lee Boggs, who opened the door to emergence and pushed me through, who taught me to keep listening and learning and having conversations. She said, “Transform yourself to transform the world.” I dedicate this book also to the memory of Charity Hicks, who saw all the interconnected patterns as clear as day. She said, “Wage love.

Introduction:

“First and foremost, thank you for opening this book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed living, learning, and gathering it.

You are basically holding a book of me saying, “Wow, everything’s so amazing!” Or, “That’s not wow... Why not go with the wow option?

Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind.

With our human gift of reasoning, we have tried to control or overcome the emergent processes that are our own nature, the processes of the planet we live on, and the universe we call home. The result is crisis at each scale we are aware of, from our deepest inner moral sensibilities to the collective scale of climate and planetary health and beyond, to our species in relation to space and time.

My style is more “Ooh ah wow how??” than “Empirical data proves that...

I am open to critiques of course, if they are offered in the spirit of collective liberation. Staying focused on our foundational miraculous nature is actually very hard work in our modern culture of deconstruction. We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses. So I am open to hearing what doesn’t work about this book, as long as you promise to stay open to what does work.

Octavia Butler, one of the cornerstones of my awareness of emergent strategy, spoke of the fatal human flaw as a combination of hierarchy and intelligence. We are brilliant at survival, but brutal at it. We tend to slip out of togetherness the way we slip out of the womb, bloody and messy and surprised to be alone.

One thing I have observed: When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts.

Perhaps humans’ core function is love. Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion. I think of how delightful it is to see something new in my lovers’ faces, something they may only know from inside as a feeling.

If love were the central practice of a new generation of organizers and spiritual leaders, it would have a massive impact on what was considered organizing. If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see that there’s no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea—but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential.

We would understand that the strength of our movement is in the strength of our relationships, which could only be measured by their depth. Scaling up would mean going deeper, being more vulnerable and more empathetic.

The Sufi poet Hafiz said, “How do I listen to others? As if everyone were my Teacher, speaking to me (Her) cherished last words.”

Hafiz and Daniel Landinsky, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

Things like:

• The less I engage in gossip, the less I harbor suspicion, the more space I find within myself for miraculous experiences.

• When I fear the universe, I fear myself. When I love and am in awe of the universe, I love and am in awe of myself. Imagine then, the power when I align with the universe.

• Nothing is required of me more than being, and creating. Simultaneously being present with who I am, who we are as a species...and creating who we must become, and within that who I must become.

Birds don’t make a plan to migrate, raising resources to fund their way, packing for scarce times, mapping out their pit stops. They feel a call in their bodies that they must go, and they follow it, responding to each other, each bringing their adaptations.

There is an art to flocking: staying separate enough not to crowd each other, aligned enough to maintain a shared direction, and cohesive enough to always move towards each other. (Responding to destiny together.) Destiny is a calling that creates a beautiful journey.

It is so important that we fight for the future, get into the game, get dirty, get experimental. How do we create and proliferate a compelling vision of economies and ecologies that center humans and the natural world over the accumulation of material?

We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure, because it’s all data.

But first we imagine.

We are in an imagination battle.

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.

In 1992, Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science, based on her work with organizations and leaders on what is effective, through a lens

of quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory. Her key learnings were that:

• everything is about relationships, critical connections;

• chaos is an essential process that we need to engage;

• the sharing of information is fundamental for success; and

• vision is an invisible field that binds us together, emerging from relationships and chaos and information.

Audre Lorde’s essay The Uses of the Erotic is foundational writing on the radical act of tuning into pleasure and not settling for less than the erotic sense of wholeness and rightness in one’s life. She is my ancestor in the lineage of this particular work and many others.

Detroit musician/spiritual teacher/friend Sterling Toles told me he considers himself a “dressing room where people can try on their most authentic selves,” and this has been a guiding visual for me when I am engaged in my healing work.

I read sci fi and visionary fiction as political, sacred, and philosophical text, and I engage with others who read it that way. I spent the first part of my life learning what history’s victors wanted to tell me to believe about the past, including the simple assumption that it was the past. I see massive patterns of violence and inequality in history, which perpetuate

in the daily news. Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior. While I have done deep dives in the work of Samuel Delaney, Ursula Le Guin, and others, I started this scholarship in earnest with Octavia.

I have learned that feeling matters, that feeling is an important and legitimate way of knowing. This learning has come most formally through Somatics (particularly the social justice and somatics blend found in generative somatics, through the work of Staci Haines, Spenta Kandawalla, Liu Hoi-man, Lisa Thomas Adeyemo, Chris Lymbertos, Vassilissa Johri, and Richard Strozzi-Heckler), and Robert Gass’s work on the art of transformation now developing and evolving into emergent strategies at the Social Transformation Project under the leadership of Jodie Tonita, Eugene Kim, Idelisse Malave, and others.

Principles of Emergent Strategy

“In the study and practice of emergent strategy, there are core principles that have emerged and that guide me in learning and using this idea and method in the world. I gather them here with the expectation that they will grow.

Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)

Change is constant. (Be like water).

There is always enough time for the right work.

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

Never a failure, always a lesson.

Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy).

Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships.

Less prep, more presence.

What you pay attention to grows

Elements of Emergent Strategy

“Grace often said that every crisis is an opportunity, which is amazing theoretically, and requires great emotional fortitude in practice, as well as the maturity to understand that the negative realization of that theory is “disaster capitalism.

Complex Movements is also studying the relationship between emergence and movements for social justice. Their emblem system is a gorgeous way of learning properties of nature we can apply to our work.

Mycelium is the part of the fungus that grows underground in thread-like formations. It connects roots to one another and breaks down plant material to create healthier ecosystems. Mycelium is the largest organism on earth. Interconnectedness. Remediation. Detoxification.

Ants. Ant societies function through individual ants acting collectively in accord with simple, local information to carry on all of their survival activities. Every ant relies on the work of others in producing their own work. Cooperative work. Collective Sustainability.

Ferns are a form of fractal. A fractal is an object or quantity that displays self similarity, which means it looks roughly the same at any scale. Small-scale solutions impact the whole system. Use similar principles to build at all scales.

The Wavicle, or wave-particle duality, suggests that all objects exhibit both wave and partical properties. Between observations as it evolves on its own, it behaves like a wave; distributed across space, exploring different intermixing paths to all possible destinations. However, when its location or speed is measured, it appears definite and concrete, like a particle. Its wave nature gives this measurement a curious property: the more certain we are about either speed or position, the more uncertain we become about the other. Uncertainty/doubt. Valuing both process and outcome.

Starlings. The synchronized movement patterns of a starling flock is also known as a murmuration. Guided by simple rules, starling murmurations can react to their environment as a group without a central leader orchestrating their choices; in any instant, any part of the flock can transform the movement of the whole flock. Collective leadership/partnership. Adaptability.

Dandelions. The dandelion flower head can change into a white, globular seed head overnight. Each seed has a tiny parachute that allows it to spread far and wide in the wind. The entire plant has medicinal properties. Dandelions are often mistakenly identified as weeds, aggressively removed, but are hard to uproot; the top is pulled but the long taproot remains. Resilience. Resistance. Regeneration. Decentralization.

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent

processes of the world and each other:

• We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land.

• We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo.

• We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home?

• We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance.

• We learn to compete with each other in a scarcitybased economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in.

• We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness.

• We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together.

• We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments.

• We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life.

• 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.

• Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not.

• We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion.

• We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together.

• Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

(Brown, “Emergent Strategies”, p.50)

Fractals: the relationship between small and large

“How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale.

And this may be the most important element to understand—that what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”—Albert Camus

To read more about Gar Alperovitz’s exploration of the space between capitalism and socialism, visit http://garalperovitz.com/ifyoudontlike/.

To read more about Gopal Dayaneni’s work with the other brilliant members of the Movement Generation team, visit http://movementgeneration.org/.

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.

When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal. Fractals—a way to speak of the patterns we see—move from the micro to macro level. The same spirals on sea shells can be found in the shape of galaxies. We must create patterns that cycle upwards. We are microsystems.

We had to begin to practice deep, authentic collaboration. This meant a shift in how we move financial and human resources—there are enough people out there to support the movement(s) we need, but currently, organizations are pitted against each other to access money (less and less money), rather than creating and investing together to maximize a diversity of resources from money, to people, to spaces, to skills. Because we are not investing in a shared network of resources, it is easy to let structural and ideological particularities create deep splits throughout the non-profit sphere, rendering much of our work useless.

In a successful Ruckus action, the visions and solutions are deeper and more compelling than the injustice. (We are calling for a movement-wide shift away from action that isn’t grounded in a vision of deep systemic change, as that ultimately is a misuse of our time and energy.)

Intentional Adaptation: how we change

““Starlings’ murmuration consists of a flock moving in synch with one another, engaging in clear, consistent communication and exhibiting collective leadership and deep, deep trust. Every individual bird focuses attention on their seven closest neighbors and thus manage a larger flock cohesiveness and synchronicity (at times upwards of over a million birds).”

—Sierra Pickett

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?

This often results in groups centering work that doesn’t depend on factors outside of their control (such as funders, or elections, which come and go and should be well used but not directive or debilitating). The clearer you are as a group about where you’re going, the more you can relax into collaborative innovation around how to get there. You can relax into

decentralization, and you want to.

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.

Here’s how it works in a murmuration/shoal/swarm: each creature is tuned in to its neighbors, the creatures right around it in the formation. This might be the birds on either side, or the six fish in each direction. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them—too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed, and proximity based on the information of the other creatures’ bodies.

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.

As an individual, developing your capacity for adaptation can mean assessing your default reactions to change, and whether those reactions create space for opportunity, possibility, and continuing to move towards your vision.

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.

“Nature has taught me that if humans don’t figure out what revolution really means, nature will make the revolution despite us.”

—Tawana Petty

Interdependence and Decentralization: who we are and how we share

““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.”—Naima Penniman

Competition exists all over nature—being the Alpha is a big deal, competing in mating and survival cycles can be understood as natural. In the absence of reasoning, it appears to be a viable way to manage community power dynamics. 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.

b) ‘A Muslim is like a date palm tree whose leaves do not fall, always beneficial and never harmful.’

“This influences my organizing by reminding me that my core responsibility is to be a benefit to whatever I’m engaged in. I may not always know HOW that will happen but it has to be my aim. I want peoples’ lives to have been better (even in very tiny ways) from having participated with me in this work. This means to me that I bring beautiful words, actions, ideas, and behaviors into spaces. 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

Interdependence is Iterative…

What I have been studying by being hyper-aware inside my life is how much being interdependent is a series of small repetitive motions. Here are some of the things I have had to do repeatedly towards interdependence:

1. Be seen.

Initially with defensiveness (I am not like you say I am) even/especially in the face of experts (I have diagnosed myself, I know what is wrong with me).

And then, perhaps, without agency. Being seen is actually non-negotiable, though I can hide, or I can determine my level of grace and relationship in it. On so many levels, interdependence requires being seen, as much as possible, as your true self.

Meaning that your capacity and need are transparent.

Meaning even when I don’t want to look in the mirror, I am (and I choose to be) open to the attention of others. Sometimes I start with my woes, those with whom I am coevolving through friendship. I show something I’ve been hiding, and hope I’m still lovable. This generally goes better than could be expected, every single time.

Be Wrong…

Sometimes there isn’t one definitive truth. (My favorite situations.)

And sometimes there is one and you can’t see it. (Least favorite. Least.)

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. I am grateful to all the people who were softly right about me this past month when I couldn’t see my own needs.

1. Accept my Inner Multitudes…

I am not turning against myself, I am multitudes. The tide to be turned is a process of inner alignment, those who wish to support me need me to be vulnerable with that inner

Contradiction.

1. Ask for, and receive, what I need…

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. The work of promoting and protecting one personality is as

different from the work of organizing as holding one’s breath in is from an exhale.

If you are in the funding world and your primary relationship with those you fund is with the executive director, if you have not had a meaningful conversation with other staff members or community members, you may be stricken with charismitis—relational laziness induced by charismatic brilliance.

It’s ok, it happens to everyone. But you can unlearn this behavior! Edge Funders, Resource Generation, and Building Equity and Alignment are three formations working to shift this and other donor/funder malpractice.” (Brown. “Emergent Strategy”, p.101)

Nonlinear and Iterative: the pace and pathways of change

““The universe is both orderly and chaotic. We understand it to a point, and then there is mystery. And that is not linear or cumulative. There is no eventual elimination of mystery. There will always be mystery. And knowledge. Humans are both understandable and mysterious. Communion is all about acceptance, and organizing is about both.”

—Peter Hardie

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.

Let’s spend less time on the imperfection of the process, and more time articulating and crystalizing our lessons.

There are way too many people in critique mode who belong to no formation, who spend their lives writing volunteer think pieces in 140 character bursts of Internet. It makes me feel defensive of the messy chaotic beauty of transformation. Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.

I have an inner protocol in my doula work with parents and babies: ask myself if I am needed, support only as needed, do absolutely everything that is needed (change the diaper, sweep the floor, rub mama’s feet, take out the trash—no task is menial), and make space for the natural order to emerge.

Resilience: how we recover and transform

“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?

One place to turn to with a transformative justice lens is our shared vision. 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?

We have been growing otherness, borders, separateness. And in all that division we have created layer upon layer of trauma and vengefulness, conditions for permanent war, practices that move us into a battle with the very planet we rely on for all life. The scale of division, conflict, racism, xenophobia, and hierarchical supremacy on our planet is overwhelming.

Finding the places of healing and transformation, moving towards a world beyond enemies, is work that has to be done for our survival. Which means transformative justice—justice that transforms the root causes of injustice—is necessary at every scale, but I am particularly focused on how it becomes the common orientation and practice of movements for social change, for peace, for liberation.

Safety, Healing, and Agency For All

1. Safety, Healing, and Individual Agency for Survivors.

1. Accountability and a transformation for people who harm.

1. Community action, healing, and/or group/org accountability.

1. Transformation of the social conditions that perpetuate violence.

Like everything in nature, we all have gifts. Sometimes the gifts don’t seem like gifts, the bee that stings, the stinging nettle that irritates your skin. But when we look at our ecosystem in totality it is clear how each piece is necessary for the whole. It’s a reminder to make room for all of us, in all our fiery, stinging glory.”

—Karissa Lewis

When an abusive dynamic builds between lovers, family, partners, or coworkers, it is first and foremost important to understand that it is a dynamic that both/all parties are playing into, consciously and unconsciously. This is different from an abusive event—one explosive moment. This is when there is habitual emotional, spiritual, and/or physical violence and

cruelty.

An abusive dynamic is sustained by the two or more people directly involved in it, and a bevy of others who ignore, enable, or exacerbate it.

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.

You do have the right to walk away, to literally and virtually gather yourself up and remove yourself from the dynamic. Take space in order to remember and fortify yourself. You have the right to create boundaries that generate more possibilities for you. Those boundaries may be short term or permanent.

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.

Some of those have been of strangers, but recently I’ve had the experience of seeing people I know and love targeted and taken down. In most cases, very complex realities get watered down into one flawed aspect of these people’s personalities, or one mistake or misunderstanding. A mob mentality takes over then, an evisceration of character that is punitive, traumatizing, and isolating.

This has happened with increasing frequency over the past year, such that I’m wondering if those of us with an intention of transforming the world have a common understanding of the kind of justice we want to practice, now and in the future.

What we do now is find out someone or some group has done (or may have done) something out of alignment with our values. Some of the transgressions are small—saying something fucked-up, being disrespectful in a group process. Some are massive—false identity, sexual assault.

We then tear that person or group to shreds in a way that affirms our values. We create memes, reducing someone to the laughingstock of the Internet that day. We write think-pieces on how we are not like that person, and obviously wouldn’t make the same mistakes they have made. We deconstruct them as thinkers, activists, groups, bodies, partners, parents children—finding all of the contradictions and limitations and shining bright light on them. When we are satisfied that that person or group is destroyed, we move on. Or sometimes we just move on because the next scandal has arrived, the smell of fresh meat overwhelming our interest in finishing the takedown.

I say “we” and “our” intentionally here. I’m not above this behavior. I laugh at the memes, I like the apoplectic statuses, the rants with no named target that very clearly critique a specific person. I’ve been examining this—why I can get caught up in a mob on the Internet in a way I rarely do in life (the positive mob mentality I participate in for, say, Beyoncé or Björk feels quite different, though I know there is something in there about belonging…eh, next book). I have noticed that at the most basic level, I feel better about myself because I’m on the right side of history…or at least the news cycle.

But lately, as the attacks grow faster and more vicious, I wonder: is this what we’re here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values? What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy, complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left beside us?

Sometimes this was because the takedown wouldn’t have had the impact I wanted; destroying a person doesn’t destroy all of the systems that allow harmful people to do harm. These takedowns make it seem as if massive problems are determined at an individual level, as if these individuals set a course as children to become abusers, misogynists, racists, liars.

When the response to mistakes, failures, and misunderstandings is emotional, psychological, economic, and physical punishment, we breed a culture of fear, secrecy, and

isolation.

So I’m wondering, in a real way: 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?

In my facilitation and mediation work, I’ve seen three questions that can help us grow. I offer them here in context with a real longing to hear more responses, to get in deep practice that helps us create conditions conducive to life in our movements and communities.

1. Why? Listen with “Why?” as a framework…

In my mediations, “Why?” is often the game-changing, possibility-opening question. That’s because the answers rehumanize those we feel are perpetrating against us. “Why?” often leads us to grief, abuse, trauma, often undiagnosed mental illnesses like depression or bipolar disorder, difference, socialization, childhood, scarcity, loneliness. Also, “Why?” makes it impossible to ignore that we might be capable of a similar transgression in similar circumstances. We don’t want to see that.

“2. Ask yourself/selves: What can I/we learn from this?

I love the pop star Rihanna, not just because she smokes blunts in ball gowns, but because one of her earliest tattoos says, “Never a failure, always a lesson.

1. How can my real-time actions contribute to transforming this situation (versus making it worse)?

Creating More Possibilities: how we move towards life

“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.

Nature also teaches me persistence and perseverance, because in the end ‘nothing stops nature.’ If a rose can grow out of the concrete, then so can we.”

—Micah Hobbes Frazier

Spells and Practices for Emergent Strategy

“Emergent Strategy is about shifting the way we see and feel the world and each other. If we begin to understand ourselves as practice ground for transformation, we can transform the

world.

I have spoken about practice many times throughout this book, asking in many words: What is it we need to practice as individuals and communities to come more into alignment with the emergent practices of the universe we know as home?

We heal ourselves, and we heal in relationship, and from that place, simultaneously, we create more space for healed communities, healed movements, healed worlds. What I offer here are the core ways I have tapped into my own power and wholeness, and ways I have supported others to tap into their own wholeness and transformation. And fractal strategy suggests wholeness in our organizers yields wholeness in our

future.

I am a fan of being creative and self-directive with practices. What are the practices you need to line your life up with your values and beliefs?

Pattern disrupting.

I know I am always whole theoretically, but I don’t always feel that way, I feel half sometimes, I feel fragmented sometimes, messy. Being whole includes owning all of that as me. When I am feeling fragmented or limited, seeing any of my friends in their wholeness reminds me of my own capacity. And as I stand in my wholeness, which includes being more honest with myself and others about what I want and who I am in the world, it exerts a pressure on others, both to receive me and to become more whole in themselves. This disrupts those

familiar diminishing patterns in my friends and in myself, the internalization of a world that has rejected every aspect of my identity at some point. Counter rejection. Still I rise. And new patterns become possible, more interconnected and interdependent patterns that rely on being open.

Present and intentional.

This is perhaps the biggest place to practice. Life is not happening to us. We are learning to be in the actual current moment, to recognize where we have choice… In a terrifying twist, it turns out we always have it. So the great question is: how to be intentional, in the present moment, to take responsibility for your state of being, and for your life? Another participant-teacher in the community of practice, Jane Sung E Bai, asked us to consider, “What if I am responsible for everything?” It’s not a singular task, to be responsible for what happens in this world—we do not exist or transform in isolation

Authenticity chant:

Let me not posture

Let me not front

Let me not say yes to

Lives I don’t want

Let me not use words that don’t mean a thing

Let me be fly

as I am, no trying

Let me good

For my heart, not my rep

Let me be still

When I can’t take a step

Don’t let me get too caught

Creating my face

Let me just love me

All over the place

Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. 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. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist. And visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together. Visionary fiction is neither utopian nor dystopian, instead it

is like real life: Hard, realistic… Hopeful as a strategy. Visionary fiction disrupts the hero narrative concept that one person (often one white man, often Matt Damon) alone has the skills to save the world. Cultivate fiction that explores change as a collective, bottom-up process. Fiction that centers those who are currently marginalized—not to be nice, but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative—practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least, an important skill area on a planet whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people. Visionary fiction is constantly applying lessons from our past to our future(s). The best way to practice visionary fiction is to get to writing. The Octavia’s Brood website offers workshops, and you can also write on your own, form writing groups, and share stories with others. You have worlds inside you. You have permission to share them

What my meditation teachers have shared with me is that meditation is about choosing where my attention goes. Training my attention. And that when I am overcome by sadness, loss, anger, joy, desire, restlessness, or other emotions, it helps to be able to drop into myself and choose—to be with the emotions intentionally, to listen for what is needed. This has been a path into emergent strategy—the more I listen, the more I understand the interconnectedness of the world, and my place in it, my insignificance, my wholeness, our collective potential and beauty.

Ursula Le Guin speaks to this: “To sit and be fully aware of the air going in and out of your nose, and nothing else, this sounds really stupid. If you haven’t tried it yet, try it. It is really stupid. Nothing your intellect can do to help you do it. This must be why so many people for so long have used it as a way towards wisdom.

Use poetry! In our generative somatics courses, we often read poems at the beginning and end of our meditations. Some of my favorites for meditation are:

“The Prison Cell,” Mahmoud Darwish;

“The Journey,” Mary Oliver;

“Yes, We Can Talk,” Mark Nepo; and everything from June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Warsaw

Shire, or Nayirrah Waheed.

Tools for Emergent Strategy Facilitation:

““If you do not trust the people, they will become untrustworthy.”

—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

All of the following tools are either explicitly tools for emergent strategy, or can be adapted to work with the elements of emergent strategy.

There are four universal tools—Trust the People, Principles, Protocols, and Consensus—that just feel foundational. After that, I have grouped most of these tools by emergent strategy element, but feel free to liberate them and use them in any way that works for you!

Trust the People

One of the primary principles of emergent strategy is trusting the people. The flip of Lao Tzu’s wisdom is: if you trust the people, they become trustworthy. Trust is a seed that grows with attention and space. The facilitator can be a gardener, or the sun, the water.

1. Goal setting/intention.

Why are we meeting? What can this group uniquely accomplish? There are always a ton of relevant conversations that could happen, but there is usually a very small set of conversations that a particular group, at a particular moment in history, can have and move forward, given their capacity, resources, time, focus, and beliefs. The organizers should have this question at the center of their planning for the event…

The goal can be relationship building—this is often the most necessary piece of work in terms of strengthening a group’s resilience and capacity to move together. “Don’t thingify,” Taj offered me recently, when I was in a moment of pressure to produce “outcomes” at a large gathering. “Humanify! Shifting our way of being is our tangible outcome. Systems change comes from big groups making big shifts in being.” And remember, passion is a more valuable force for action and accountability than obligation, so let the goals be inspiring, uplifting what will inspire the most passionate conversation and participation.

2. Invite the right people.

We invite people to meetings for a lot of the wrong reasons—obligation, guilt, representation…even love. The questions to ask when shaping the invitation list are: “Who is directly impacted by this issue?”; “Who is doing compelling work on this issue?”; and “Who can move this work forward?” Inviting the right people means we aren’t wasting time by renegotiating the goals nonstop throughout the meeting and/or managing the dissonance that occurs (righteously in my opinion) when a participant, who shouldn’t be at the meeting, tries to make it worth their time by derailing the process of advancing the stated goals. Everyone should be able to be themselves and move their own agendas in the space if the invitation list is right.

Now, right people doesn’t mean easy people—conflict and difference are often an important part of advancing the work, bringing the real issues into the room. Trust is built when the right people are in the right room, and can bring their opinions and work into a container that advances their individual and collective goals.

3. Individual participant articulation.

There are real language barriers—both literal and cultural—that mean we often think we are hearing each other, but we actually have no clue what others are saying. We all have filters, only some of which we are aware.

In a gathering, this can create the utmost confusion. Folks are using different cultural references, different touch points and acronyms, coming from widely different experiences and passions—even if what they are saying is similar, they can’t hear and understand each other.

4. A living agenda.

Develop a spacious, adaptable agenda so the participants can shape the meeting.

Again, our tendency is to make use of the precious in- person time of a meeting by filling up every minute, from the beginning to the end of the day, with formal session time, creating schedules that are hard to change when new information comes along. These agendas are often burdened by an unrealistic hope, an underestimation of how long conversations may actually take. Most conversations need at least 1.5 hours to adequately cover a basic orientation around the content, identify what is needed, and identify clear next steps. And that’s conservative.

Add an introduction round and you have a two- to three-hour conversation.

A meaningful full group conversation needs roughly five minutes per person. Underscheduling the amount of time a conversation needs means that energy will start to build up as people look for a way to release their thoughts and ideas into the group. Pair this with the power dynamics that often emerge—that some people feel really comfortable talking, and others don’t—and you have a frustrating waste of time on your

on your hands.

Folks are so used to not being heard. So used to not getting their needs met. When people feel heard, the time starts to expand as people move past expressing and start to be able to listen.

5. Listen with love!

The participants absolutely mean to be listening to each other, but their own agendas might fill up their ears with misunderstandings or frustrations. Your work as a facilitator is to listen to the needs of the group, help the participants to be clear to and with each other, and make sure you actually understand what folks in the room need.

Listen to the feedback you request that comes directly, and to the other feedback that flows in from the edges, the participants who need something more…

Taking time to hear the participants in the margins of the agenda can actually help get the event on point. And I can’t count the number of times a disgruntled participant was actually just misunderstanding something that, when clarified, made them a star participant.

There is a conversation in the room that wants and needs to be had. Don’t force it, don’t deny it. Let it come forth.

1. What you gonna do?

Gibrán Rivera once articulated a question to me: “What is the next most elegant step?”

I love this question and use it to shape conversations all the time. Too often we come up with plans that don’t take into account the fog on the horizon. Then we go off and the work doesn’t happen, perhaps can’t happen, and then we feel demoralized when our energy doesn’t flow into action or desired outcomes.

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.”

In any conversation—and I would say in any moment in life—there is a next elegant step—one that is possible and strategic based on who is taking it and where they are trying to go. Find it and you cannot fail.

Tools for Increasing Interdependence and Decentralization

Study Groups/Learning Community

This one seems so simple and old school, but having community to learn with is actually really crucial for human development. It means we learn to see ideas, not just through our own singular and limited perspectives, but to see how different experiences create different ways of thinking about things, of comprehending and applying ideas.

Loretta Ross teaches us that, “When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction,

that’s a movement.”...

The more people who grow understanding and vision together, the more people who will feel at home in the resulting experiments. Right now we are living inside the results of other peoples’ imaginations—people who couldn’t imagine Black people being free, fat girls being sexy, disabled people being leaders. People who could only imagine their own power and dominance. When more people imagine together, and then step from imagining into thinking through the structures and protocols of a society together, then more needs are attended to. Responding to common text is a great way to do this. And it doesn’t have to be just a reading group—it can be a group that watches films, listens to music, or compares experiments in changing movement practices.

Learning in community helps us see how our own ideas are shifting over time. Hopefully we develop and change with time, applying life experience to our way of seeing the world. It seems a sign of immaturity to hold fast to one position regardless of new information.

Transformative Justice Tools

Generative Conflict Relationship Prompts

Conflict is natural between any two people. We all come from different life/family/world experiences—so even when we love each other, even when we are building movement together, we will have different opinions, different ideas on what is right. Here are some conversations that help clarify approaches to conflict and difference:

• What are our individual ways/practices of conflict?

• How did conflict happen in our families?

• In past (romantic, familial, friend) relationships, what are the best ways we have handled conflict? And what are the worst?

• What emotions are we most comfortable with? Least comfortable with?

How would we handle conflict and difference in our ideal world?

Specifically:

• When would we have conversations around potential tension or difference? (ASAP? During staff meetings? During a set “relationship date” time [some lovers hold a couple of hours once a week for concentrated time—babysitters, different/private space, etc.]? Before going to bed? Other?)

• Where would we have these conversations? (At the office? At a neutral location? At home? Away from home? Outdoors?)

• How would we have these conversations? (How do we want to feel during these conversations? Are there behaviors or words that would make the conversation feel unsafe or disrespectful?)

• How important is resolution to us?

A lot of times, conflict is an invitation to deepen, to learn more about each other. How do we best learn?

Possibilities:

• I learn best from reading/watching stuff and reflecting together.

• I learn best from conversation (Calm conversation? Heated conversation?).

• I learn best by being given something to reflect on, and adequate time to reflect on it.

• Other.

Finally, pay attention to what’s already in motion in your pairing or group—there is a pattern in place already in most cases, understanding it will give you more agency in shifting it. Ask yourselves: What do we notice as our patterns right now?

Understanding that you can be wrong, have been wrong, helps to increase the compassion needed to work through the emotional and material impacts of being wronged by another. We often think that we must hold our position, regardless of what we learn or feel. But in fact, the opposite is true. We must learn to develop positions together, adapting to the changing conditions around us—sometimes this means we must relinquish our positions, to voice our feelings and thoughts, and hear and be influenced by, other people’s opinions and information. Dialectical humanism suggests that mature humans actually need to be able to adjust beliefs and plans in the realm of changing conditions.