Lessons from "Emergent Strategy"

✌🏾 ❤️ ✊🏾 Friday (Saturday night bc I've been under the weather and probably have outgrown redeye flights),

The book "Emergent Strategy" by adrienne maree brown crept into so many of my most generative (and regenerative) conversations lately, it was pretty clear I needed to stop pretending and read it already.

And -- wow -- that this book exists, makes me excited to be in this world right now. I'm kicking myself for taking so long to pick up a copy.

It invites us to remember/name/imagine what we are fighting for, rather than what we're against. (A little starved for optimism, I'd recently enacted a nonfiction diet precisely because I so desperately needed a book with a message like this.)

Here are five of my favorite takeaways - if you've read Emergent Strategy, I'm curious to hear what are yours?

Temporary Perfection.

The most moving, also most obvious, takeaway I had from Emergent Strategy, is that fiction can inform nonfiction. Specifically, Octavia Butler's visionary worlds and vivid concepts can be applied to logic, strategy, organizational planning. Change is the common language of the world, and adrienne maree brown lays out a broadly applicable manual for transformation, in Emergent. The grounding nature of her writing (literally, calling on organizers and orchestrators to draw from patterns and solutions already found in nature) reminds us simply that "connection to each other is the most important thing to cultivate in the face of hopelessness -- we don't want to cling to outdated paradigms; we want to cling to each other and shift the paradigms." Humbly, brown acknowledges that in accordance with emergence, all the ideas in the book may evolve beyond recognition sooner or later, and that's exactly the point. It reminded me of the mantra of "temporary perfection" that I had been turning over and over in my mind throughout reading this book. (Is there really no such thing as perfect, or is everything perfect only temporarily?)

Transform yourself to transform the world.

In a moment of OK, BUT WHAT'S MY TRUE PURPOSE, REALLY? I was ripe for the reminder that perhaps just by supporting my own imagination, I'm playing my part: "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

adrienne maree brown asks us to really contemplate how to cultivate the muscle of radical imagination needed to dream together beyond fear. "Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma," brown states, "reclaiming the right to dream the future... is a revolutionary decolonizing activity." This book made me realize that I've wasted a lot of my time and energy looking outwardly, to others, asking "how do I need to be in order for my life to matter?" 

We are creating a world we have never seen.

Also on the topic of radical imagination, adrienne maree brown is herself a reminder that what once was considered science-fiction (Black kids and white kids pictured sitting together at a lunch counter), might one day (or now) be reality, and there is always some tolerance for messiness required to bring about that transition. As a biracial person, I've always been especially sensitive to the language of either/or (and especially drawn to the messy middle) - I recognize that. But this book checked me with a much needed reframe of that worldview, which is that at one point in time, my parents as a couple would have been considered sci-fi. The wildest imaginations of my seemingly ill-fitting eight great grandparents (named above) are now reality, and I may honor them simply by continuing to engage my own imagination. Maybe nothing more is needed - how radical!

Practice. Practice. Praxis.

"To create a world in which conflict and trauma aren't the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species." Again, straightforwardly, a section of the book details adrienne's own personal self care regimen and practical application of emergent strategy. I appreciated the framing of "practice" and the call to be intentional about what we practice; that we may practice towards desired outcomes but we may also practice or reinforce undesired outcomes, if we aren't intentional about it. It reminded me of the Audre Lorde quote: "We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired." (from The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action) Learning to achieve a different outcome or manifest a new vision requires an awareness and intensity of practice, which can only start by asking the question: "What are the practices you need to line your life up with your values and beliefs?"

Building, not Selling.

Finally, tucked into a couple of places in the book was a reminder to remember that shaping change implies building (collaborating with) others, not selling (pitching to, or convincing) others. The maxim of "building alignment, not selling ideas" brought up this quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. about the definition of leadership: "A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus." And while "building, not selling" stood out to me as a massive a-ha, all of adrienne's Rules of the Room for workshops are stealable:

• less prep, more presence
• low ego, high impact
• building alignment, not selling ideas
• relationship is the measure of our strength
• this will be as amazing as you are
• trust your own work and each other

What a generous, actionable, insightful, (and, despite my takeaway no. 1) timeless book.

Simply and sincerely, thank you.