A Collaborate Reflection on Emergent Strategy

The Gladis Team 1's review of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown (she/they), is a brilliant beacon illuminating many pathways forward to collective liberation. In an informational sea swirling with self-help and social justice handbooks, brown has built us a lighthouse, presenting pivotal principles, well-honed practices, poetry, spells, conversations, a library’s worth of resources, and most effectively, a gently honest and vision-oriented voice.

In her introduction, brown defines “emergent strategy” as a “strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions.” In homage to the motifs of interdependence, decentralization, and fractals (“what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system”) repeated throughout the book, several of our writers share their personal takeaways from different sections of Emergent Strategy.

We chose this book to review because we wanted to remind ourselves that none of us are alone and that we have resources. As we ride waves of anger, grief, shift, and questions while witnessing devastating tragedy from Palestine to Sudan, from Congo to the streets of Kansas City, we tether ourselves to the anchors of community and possibility.

Every individual/community who desires to embody collective liberation can start with Emergent Strategy, and walk away rich in mindsets & practical methodologies that can seed and nurture effective, long-term movement.

MICHELE

on embodiment and intentional change

adrienne maree brown says:

“Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.”

This quote resonates deeply in me because I’ve changed so much since my early endeavors and am still in constant change and practice of embodiment.

I used to be told I had “a bleeding heart.” I heard this often enough to believe that I did. And I would credit this part of me for guiding different choices I’ve made in life, like pursuing a career in the medical field or deciding to become a missionary in my 30s. (Neither of these ended up being my vocation.) Nowadays I’d describe that bleeding heart as a desire to “make a difference in the world.” 

Interestingly, my bleeding heart seemed to come naturally and with ease. I got to wallow in the woes of the world and the feelings that came with it. I felt comfortable seeking solutions outside myself, never having to face what was actually happening within me. 

However, after endlessly pushing myself to make a difference by pursuing medical school and attending a Christian missions school, I realized that I’d been seeking change in the wrong places. Making a difference started with me. I needed to pursue myself, to attend to me.

adrienne maree brown writes:

“I love the idea of shifting from ‘mile wide inch deep’ movements to ‘inch wide mile deep’ movements...” 

This idea is meaningful to me because I’ve learned personally that depth is where lasting transformation happens. When I began to dive deeply into myself, to explore what my own values were when not defined by external sources, I discovered small talk doesn’t feel good to me. I am energized by finding some common ground with another, and then I want to go deep. Because I’ve experienced the changes that this way of approaching relationships creates, I believe it’s the shift we need collectively. 

brown tells us that Emergent Strategy  “is for people who want to radically change the world. To apply natural order and our love of life to the ways we create the next world. To tap into the most ancient systems and patterns for wisdom as we build tomorrow.”

Having put in countless miles hiking desert trails, I’ve become acquainted with and mesmerized by cacti. Saguaros hundreds of years old, standing steady and on guard. Chollas with segments that easily break off and take root to proliferate. Prickly Pears that thrive on hillsides by using their pads to capture water and soil runoff. They can withstand the extreme heat and dry conditions of the desert. The resilience and beauty of the desert landscape will never cease to amaze me.

Changing the world can seem so daunting, and way beyond my capacity. But then I can just look to the natural order of the desert to remind me that there are so many ways to flourish, to progress, to bloom in an inhospitable environment. These systems offer me the capacity for my own work and beyond. 

My heart is changing and may it never be called bleeding again. Emergent Strategy has compelled me to seek a heart filled with possibilities. A heart aware of how broken the systems of the world are, but just as aware that small acts matter in the work needed to repair what is broken. I want my heart to beat for pleasure and not pain.

I no longer want to make a difference in the world. I want to radically change it. 

Emergent Strategy offers me the hope to believe I can and the tools to know I will.

 JAY

on intentional adaptation

In adrienne maree brown’s chapter “Elements of Emergent Strategy,” they highlight the phenomenon of starling murmuration and how the group’s synchronized motion can shift at a moment’s notice, as “any part of the flock can transform the movement of the whole flock.”

This beautiful, collaborative flight might feel breathlessly chaotic to those of us who have come of age in a culture of “strategic planning,” where large-scale change is often associated with meticulously calculated and controlled shifts. But like the entirety of Emergent Strategy, this ancestral and ancient wisdom of evolution to which adrienne maree brown is pointing us feels strangely familiar—as if we had encountered it in a dream.

Perhaps you, like me, have felt the tug of dissociation at the back end of a several-hours-long meeting and started to wonder what it is that you're doing here and how you can escape the sense of meaninglessness. Too often we're not socialized or incentivized to believe there could be a better way or that the better way could feel like flow.

brown suggests a culture of strategic intentions rather than strategic planning. Instead of trying to bend the universe to the 5 sticky notes on the board, or forcing a group’s goals into tight, pressurized timelines, brown has found that a subtle shift in expectations lets a team become clearer on how a destination looks and feels. The team can relax into collaboration. 

This has been a deeply impactful lesson for me: if we are willing to part with some control and to allow truths to emerge through care, then we leave space for unexpected, transformative ideas to come into the light. By allowing for a continual dialogue, where the only deliberate or fixed strategy we have is to become more interdependent, we are able to adapt with intention.

The premise of intentional adaptation offers us relief from the excruciating exhaustion of loneliness, of powering through, of the burnout that seems to wait outside of our doors in the morning. What it will cost us is our illusion of certainty, re-orienting our approach to change from big bold shifts towards small, incremental, collaborative, sustainable change. 

When my understanding of “change” begins to align with the version put forward in Emergent Strategy, I begin to focus my energy on creating shared understanding, looking for intentions more than outcomes, and building trust. Specific words that I do or do not say are not as important as building the skill of perception and responding. 

Instead of “actionable plans” and “smart goals”, adrienne maree brown gives me the only true metric I need to begin this path: how do I “pass time in the most beautiful way possible,” knowing that “this is all the miracle…being lived by my miraculous irreplaceable body in a dynamic and outstanding system of life moving towards life”?

This is not something I can fail in, it's a moment-to-moment directive I can use to reorient myself toward where I want to be.

Like the starlings, intentional adaptation requires a collective tuning in—to each other, to ourselves, to the change itself. Where our callouses often become a refuge against the grief, heartache, and overwork that can be so pervasive, it can feel like a terribly tall order to get to a point where you can be moved to tears in your lunch break by something beautiful, or find a moment of peace in your bumper-to-bumper trafficked commute. 

As part of our journey to be comfortable with the joys and griefs of change, instead of merely bulldozing our way through them, we get to soften. To become tender, to be fluid like water that always finds a way to flow. 

I’m still asking questions about how to live this in a vocational context, but I am also learning to engage my anger and frustration in healthy ways, to coast like a bird when I can, to conserve energy as the default, and to give out of abundance rather than stress. 

Part of this is, in a very literal sense, embracing: 

"It's all data, all this learning. Tender data"

As a data-adjacent professional, this is not a weekend pursuit but a daily one. When I sit with the data, and therefore sit with everything, because everything is data, and allow it to tell me what lives within it rather than trying to crunch it into a balloon animal shape, how can it not leave me transformed? When nature doesn't halt at the office door, when I bring it in within me, I can better see how everything is, as brown says, in the “movement towards life, towards longing.” When this is also held as data, I become real. When I embrace adaptation and decentralization, I make space for the kind of change in which we can all flow together.

AMANDA

on liberated relationships

I was personally captivated by the element of transformative justice & resilience in Emergent Strategy, particularly through the lens of what adrienne maree brown calls “liberated relationships.” Per brown, liberated relationships are characterized by 1) radical honesty, 2) the acknowledgment of power dynamics and “evolving beyond them,” and 3) choosing curiosity and acceptance over reengineering each other. Brown presents the truth that these characteristics must be leveraged, instead of accepting the more socially approved (and efficient) anti-strategies of cancel culture and unproductive public call-outs, if transformative justice is the reality we want to create.

Actively liberated relationships feel like the heart and soul of the praxis of Emergent Strategy—not only are all of these character traits present in the very specific sections for movement leaders on the mechanics of how to run meetings, develop community visions, and generate something sustainable; but also because relationships, and approaching them with these tools gifts in hand, are truly what shapes, and ultimately changes the world. 

For instance, don’t our oppressive systems exist because severely dishonest, imbalanced, and non-curious (i.e. UNliberated) relationships have been easier to incubate in a fear culture? And doesn’t this mean that if we change our direction, our interactions, our values, via relationships, we are cultivating a non-fear-based culture? Every significant change of mind I have personally undergone was directly supported by and often catalyzed by, equally significant relationships. This reality also ties back to the fractal nature of emergent strategy—the whole is an immediate reflection of the parts. I believe that if we breathe liberation into and toward as many person-to-person relationships as possible, the world cannot help but shift. 

Maybe you’ve heard (and hated) the popular phrase “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” For a long time, I couldn’t name why I disliked the saying so intensely. Now, I’ve realized it’s because it rings hollow to me…because facts don’t change people. Feelings change people. Feelings of love, and fear, and pain, and joy change us, transform us, remake us. The emotions are often generated through, by, and within relationships.

Not everyone can be a leader within a movement (though I am fascinated by the question of what in and around us would change if we all did, reflectively, quietly, choose ourselves as partners in some kind of change-tending movement); but everyone has relationships. My own personal participation in the world, through these relationships, is the single effect I can unequivocally influence. 

brown’s work in Emergent Strategy is teaching me that personally cultivating and partnering in liberated relationships―radically honest, eyes-open and evolving, curious and committed relationships—is how we, you and me, shape change and change the world.

‘A Collaborate Reflection on Emergent Strategy’ is brought to you by The Gladis Team 1 led by

Michele Elizaga

. This was a collaborative book read and review written by Michele,

Amanda

(who also worked as editor), and

SheShallConquer

. Other team members include

Jennifer Thein

.