I love adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy, and upon a cursory search on this blog, I think I’ve written five different posts about it. The book is an empowering paradigm shift in how we understand our relationships, our connection to the nature, activism, organizing, and our processes for affecting change.
Though I’ve written about this a lot over the years, this post is really a hat tip to Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana who has been writing about Emergent Strategy during Lent in her subscriber newsletter, The Blue Room. She shared a few quotes from adrienne maree brown this week along with her own reflections. I thought, “I’d like pass along those quotes too.” So here they are. (Thank you, MaryAnn!)
adrienne maree brown likes to say, “In the framework of emergence, the whole is the mirror of the parts… the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.”
She talks in this conversation with Krista Tippett about working as an activist during a presidential season:
“[“But] it’s layer on top of layer on top of layer. And if none of us are practicing democracy anywhere, it’s not going to just suddenly work at the top layer…So I started asking people, because I was touring a book we had written. And I started asking people, Do you practice democracy — anywhere in your life? [laughs] Not even politically, but just in your household? Who makes the decisions about the budget? …There was almost nobody who was practicing it on their block or in their community or in their organizations or other places. Everyone’s kind of dodging the actual work of democracy, small-d democracy.
“So we’re doing all this organizing, and it clicked for me… we are trying to just change the top layer of this very layered cake, this very layered process, this system of governance.”
And here are the principle’s of Emergent Strategy, listed by adrienne maree brown. She talks about each in more detail throughout the book:
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.
What do you think?
Smuggling Grace 