Why "emergent strategy" is the way through....

Redefining how crucial this concept is to the times we live in

While reviewing the often tangled accumulations of thoughts that have become my new book’s first draft, I have found a few juicy pieces that need to be given space outside of the book. Writing here gives me a chance for me to expand upon what I began to explore a few years ago, helping it ripen in the present moment.

Last week I posted a short piece about the London Writer’s Salon as an emergent strategy, and I now recognize that it’s important to explain more about this phenomena.

There was a moment when we were living in Seattle about 10 years ago, when an organization promoting art for social change, The New Foundation (now sadly extinct), seemed to suddenly arrive on the scene. I was dumbfounded and grateful to read their mission statement and learned that they were going to support a bunch of socially engaged art practices. I was eager to connect with them since the energy fueling art for social change seemed quite sporadic locally.

I learned that a group from Detroit called, Complex Movements, would be in residence in south Seattle, leading workshops while developing a participatory installation for the local community. I signed up to attend two of their workshops and was captivated by their insights. They used emblems from nature like mycelium, dandelions, and ants to amplify the energetic properties of movement building: mycelium refers to underground interconnectedness and nourishment, dandelions symbolize resilience, resistance, regeneration, decentralization, and detoxification, and ants speak about cooperation and sustainable collaboration. They also talked about ferns as fractals, wavicles, starlings, with each one epitomizing an aspect of movement building. While I’m sure they mentioned the term “emergent strategy” at some point during their work with us, it didn’t stick out at the time. It wasn’t until adrienne maree brown’s podcasts and writings hooked me in that the term became vivid for me.

Adrienne’s book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, came into my life just before the pandemic. I was signed up for one of her intensive workshops in August 2019, soon after returning from Chiapas in an attempt to learn from Zapatista visioning and actions (read more about that journey here). Sadly, about a week after returning from Mexico, I came down with an intense, pandemic precursor virus that kept me from meeting and learning from adrienne in person. Perhaps my consolation prize was discovering the podcast she hosts with her sister, Autumn Brown. It’s called “How to Survive the End of the World.”

I was floored by how much of their conversations converged with my own visions and questions about the times we’re moving through and I wrote them a fan letter gushing with enthusiasm for their work. The richness of their podcast fed parts of me that needed care and support. When I learned that Grace Lee Boggs and Octavia Butler had been big influence’s on adrienne’s work, I had even more gratitude for what she and others at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute were gestating and lifting up.

During this pandemic, I’ve been greedy for learning about things from all over the world. When my life shifted from hyper-mobility and full-time teaching to one centered on caregiving in the home, art making, tending the garden, facilitating in the neighborhood and the local community, as well as writing, the world of listening to podcasts and zoom seminars began to occupy more terrain in this brain. For those of us who consider ourselves lifelong learners, the internet and social media have been both a blessing and a curse. You can access so much in a few seconds, and it can distract you from all that needs tending in your work. Moderation is something I’m still working on.

The definition of what is Emergent Strategy is something that is constantly evolving, both for the collective and within my own mind. Even within amb’s book of the same name, she traces a piece of that evolution explaining how the concept initially came out of Octavia Butler’s models of adaptive and relational leadership so vividly explored in her speculative fiction novels. Change is the spiritual signpost of Butler’s stories, so it is no surprise that as amb and her cohort were training others, that emergent strategies expanded into a deeper understanding of organizational models, systems that promoted resilience and transformative justice, and new ways of understanding the complex patterns that might increase interdependence, non-linear change, true liberation, and social justice.

adrienne says it best on page 24 of her book, Emergent Strategy: “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for” and “ways for humans to practice being in right relationship to our home and each other and grow a compelling future together through relatively simple interactions.” In this way, the philosophy mimics permaculture design, and adrienne speaks to that influence as well as others, like biomimicry.

Envisioning and growing a compelling future that offers a more liberatory reshaping of our world is hard work when despair and grief lick at your psyche on a daily basis. I wouldn’t be able to do this work without a meditation practice and other tools that bring in tastes of delight and gratitude in the midst of the harsh realities that are dished up on the regular.

Growing a future that offers nourishing space for all beings includes the difficult process of peeling off layers of programming; first of all, all the violence and inequities caused by patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism, and secondly, the notion that we are all separate. Somehow we must each take on this work more intensively, despite the persistent backlash and entrenched forces that are using fear to manipulate us into obedience. It’s essential for more of us to gain insight into how oppressive systems operate both within and outside of us, and this may mean joining support groups, getting counseling or just slowing down to see what traumas and cognitive dissonances we’ve been avoiding in our lives. Once we have the stillness to stir our own pots, and see what needs filtering or scraping off, then our imaginations can lift us into another realm and give us navigation tools.

These efforts need to gain momentum in this time of climate emergency, since all the oppressive systems are lurking inside of ecocide. It’s also essential that more of the collective puts their shoulders and their creativity to the wheel. And while we’re busy with the discomfort of deconstructing and healing trauma, pumping a wide variety of joys into that future would be sweet.

For far too long, in this lifetime, I was riding the wave of what’s wrong, licking my own wounds, while trying to get others who were numb to wake up and take in the issues that need to be addressed, but over the past three and a half decades (since my training with Thich Nhat Hanh and with the gentle and loving influence of my ordained lay monk spouse, Dr. B-Z), I’ve learned to embrace what’s right (to water the wholesome seeds in my store consciousness). The process of awakening requires more than pushing the messes in the faces of others. In a time when people are experiencing heightened uncertainty and fears of all kinds this is definitely not the strategy with the most effectiveness. Yes, critical thinking is always important, but not when the research brings us to a place of panic.

I have learned to acknowledge the benefits of being in this body, with these particular gifts and limitations, and that my work as an artist, writer, and co-facilitator is to help others find the tools to face their core wounds, and to strengthen and ground with what’s right before taking on more. This has been my emergent strategy, supported by so many dear loved ones and teachers, as well as support systems in the quantum realm that include ancestor and energetic forces. It’s been a rewilding of my rational and skeptical self that takes synchronicities like the murder of crows, hundreds of them that just flew off in front of my studio window, who just lifted my spirits into the ethereal and reminded me that the writing I am doing is informed by forces I cannot control. This morning I woke up with the idea that there are invisible ushers or escorts opening the portals, so I did a meditation expressing my gratitude to those unseen beings, and sent love to all of the parts of my body that do the work of supporting me that I rarely give attention to. Mitakuye oyasin (we are all related in Lakota).

In my upcoming book, with the working title of Rewilding Our Muses: Creative Strategies for Navigating the End of THIS World, I hope to offer many examples of emergent strategies that I have seen gestating and bursting forth in spaces that may have seemed bereft of nourishment or in impossible circumstances. It’s important for all of us to know that we have partners, even if they are not so visible in the mainstream, busy with the work of changing the paradigm. From the reclaiming intervention of the ZAD in France to projects that combine food & racial justice with creative practices like Jubilee Justice and our beloved local cultural center, Alma. MORE SOON!!!